Information geometry in cosmological inference problems

DOI10.1088/1475-7516/2021/01/005MaRDI QIDQ5025246zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Eileen Giesel, Robert Reischke, Björn Malte Schäfer, Dominic Chia

Publication date 1 February 2022

Published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01057

zbMATH Keywords

cosmological parameters from LSSdark energy experimentssupernova type Ia-standard candles

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Approximation procedures, weak fields in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C25) Dark matter and dark energy (83C56) Galactic and stellar structure (85A15) Measures of information, entropy (94A17)

Abstract: Statistical inference more often than not involves models which are non-linear in the parameters thus leading to non-Gaussian posteriors. Many computational and analytical tools exist that can deal with non-Gaussian distributions, and empirical Gaussianisation transforms can reduce the amount of non-Gaussianity in a distribution. Alternatively, in this work, we employ methods from information geometry. The latter formulates a set of probability distributions for some given model as a manifold employing a Riemannian structure, equipped with a metric, the Fisher information. In this framework we study the differential geometrical meaning of non-Gaussianities in a higher order Fisher approximation, and their respective transformation behaviour under re-parameterisation, which corresponds to a chart transition on the statistical manifold. While weak non-Gaussianities vanish in normal coordinates in a first order approximation, one can in general not find transformations that discard non-Gaussianities globally. As an application we consider the likelihood of the supernovae distance-redshift relation in cosmology for the parameter pair ($Omeg{a}_{mathrm{m}_0}$, $w$). We demonstrate the connection between confidence intervals and geodesic length and demonstrate how the Lie-derivative along the degeneracy directions gives hints at possible isometries of the Fisher metric.

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Cited in

(2)

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 790339 (Why is no real title available?)
• Towards optimal extraction of cosmological information from nonlinear data

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• Monte Python
• MultiNest
• CosmoHammer

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