Related papers: Radical Compression of Cosmic Microwave Background…
Most parameter constraints obtained from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data are based on power estimates and rely on approximate likelihood functions; computational difficulties generally preclude an exact analysis based on…
A maximum-likelihood method is presented for estimating the power spectrum of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from interferometer observations. The method calculates flat band-power estimates in separate bins in…
Band-power estimates of cosmic microwave background fluctuations are now routinely used to place constraints on cosmological parameters. For this to be done in a rigorous fashion, the full likelihood function of band-power estimates must be…
We discuss the problem of constraining cosmological parameters with cosmic microwave background band--power estimates. Because these latter are variances, they do not have gaussian distribution functions and, hence, the standard…
The majority of present efforts to constrain cosmological parameters with cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data employ approximate likelihood functions, the time consuming nature of a complete analysis being a major obstacle. We…
We revisit the problem of exact CMB likelihood and power spectrum estimation with the goal of minimizing computational cost through linear compression. This idea was originally proposed for CMB purposes by Tegmark et al.\ (1997), and here…
The primary results of most observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy are estimates of the angular power spectrum averaged through some broad band, called band-powers. These estimates are in turn what are used to produce…
As the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is observed to higher and higher angular resolution the size of the resulting datasets becomes a serious constraint on their analysis. In particular current algorithms to determine the…
Accurate parameter estimation from cosmic microwave background data requires reliable likelihood modeling, particularly at large angular scales where angular power spectrum estimators exhibit non-Gaussian statistics. We present a novel…
We use weighted mean and median statistics techniques to combine individual cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy detections and determine binned, multipole-space, CMB anisotropy power spectra. The resultant power spectra are peaked.…
We develop two methods for estimating the power spectrum, C_l, of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from data and apply them to the COBE/DMR and Saskatoon datasets. One method involves a direct evaluation of the likelihood function, and…
Over the last decade, measurements of the CMB anisotropy has spearheaded the remarkable transition of cosmology into a precision science. However, addressing the systematic effects in the increasingly sensitive, high resolution, `full' sky…
It is widely believed that maximum likelihood estimators must be used to provide optimal estimates of power spectra. Since such estimators require require of order N_d^3 operations they are computationally prohibitive for N_d greater than a…
We propose a formalism for estimating the skewness and angular power spectrum of a general Cosmic Microwave Background data set. We use the Edgeworth Expansion to define a non-Gaussian likelihood function that takes into account the…
We employ a pixel-based likelihood technique to estimate the angular power spectrum of the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) 4-year sky maps. The spectrum is consistent with a scale-invariant power-law form with a normalization,…
The statistical properties of a map of the primary fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may be specified to high accuracy by a few thousand power spectra measurements, provided the fluctuations are gaussian, yet the number…
The measurements of the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy has proved crucial to the emergence of cosmology as a precision science in recent years. In this remarkable data rich period, the limitations…
Fast robust methods for calculating likelihoods from CMB observations on small scales generally rely on approximations based on a set of power spectrum estimators and their covariances. We investigate the optimality of these approximation,…
We have developed a fast, accurate and generally applicable method for inferring the power spectrum and its uncertainties from maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the presence of inhomogeneous and correlated noise. For maps…
We present a simple, yet accurate approximation for calculating the cosmic microwave background anisotropy power spectrum in adiabatic models. It consists of solving for the evolution of a two-fluid model until the epoch of recombination…