English

Should we doubt the cosmological constant?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2011-02-17 v1

Abstract

While Bayesian model selection is a useful tool to discriminate between competing cosmological models, it only gives a relative rather than an absolute measure of how good a model is. Bayesian doubt introduces an unknown benchmark model against which the known models are compared, thereby obtaining an absolute measure of model performance in a Bayesian framework. We apply this new methodology to the problem of the dark energy equation of state, comparing an absolute upper bound on the Bayesian evidence for a presently unknown dark energy model against a collection of known models including a flat LambdaCDM scenario. We find a strong absolute upper bound to the Bayes factor B between the unknown model and LambdaCDM, giving B < 3. The posterior probability for doubt is found to be less than 6% (with a 1% prior doubt) while the probability for LambdaCDM rises from an initial 25% to just over 50% in light of the data. We conclude that LambdaCDM remains a sufficient phenomenological description of currently available observations and that there is little statistical room for model improvement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1005.3655,
  title  = {Should we doubt the cosmological constant?},
  author = {M. C. March and G. D. Starkman and R. Trotta and P. M. Vaudrevange},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.3655},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:25:29.836Z