Galaxy Clustering Analysis with SimBIG and the Wavelet Scattering Transform

Autor: Blancard, Bruno Régaldo-Saint, Hahn, ChangHoon, Ho, Shirley, Hou, Jiamin, Lemos, Pablo, Massara, Elena, Modi, Chirag, Dizgah, Azadeh Moradinezhad, Parker, Liam, Yao, Yuling, Eickenberg, Michael
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.109.083535
Popis: The non-Gaussisan spatial distribution of galaxies traces the large-scale structure of the Universe and therefore constitutes a prime observable to constrain cosmological parameters. We conduct Bayesian inference of the $\Lambda$CDM parameters $\Omega_m$, $\Omega_b$, $h$, $n_s$, and $\sigma_8$ from the BOSS CMASS galaxy sample by combining the wavelet scattering transform (WST) with a simulation-based inference approach enabled by the ${\rm S{\scriptsize IM}BIG}$ forward model. We design a set of reduced WST statistics that leverage symmetries of redshift-space data. Posterior distributions are estimated with a conditional normalizing flow trained on 20,000 simulated ${\rm S{\scriptsize IM}BIG}$ galaxy catalogs with survey realism. We assess the accuracy of the posterior estimates using simulation-based calibration and quantify generalization and robustness to the change of forward model using a suite of 2,000 test simulations. When probing scales down to $k_{\rm max}=0.5~h/\text{Mpc}$, we are able to derive accurate posterior estimates that are robust to the change of forward model for all parameters, except $\sigma_8$. We mitigate the robustness issues with $\sigma_8$ by removing the WST coefficients that probe scales smaller than $k \sim 0.3~h/\text{Mpc}$. Applied to the BOSS CMASS sample, our WST analysis yields seemingly improved constraints obtained from a standard PT-based power spectrum analysis with $k_{\rm max}=0.25~h/\text{Mpc}$ for all parameters except $h$. However, we still raise concerns on these results. The observational predictions significantly vary across different normalizing flow architectures, which we interpret as a form of model misspecification. This highlights a key challenge for forward modeling approaches when using summary statistics that are sensitive to detailed model-specific or observational imprints on galaxy clustering.
Comment: 11+5 pages, 8+2 figures, published in Physical Review D
Databáze: arXiv