Should we doubt the cosmological constant?
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.
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