Blinding multiprobe cosmological experiments

Muir, J and Bernstein, G M and Desai, Shantanu and et al, . (2020) Blinding multiprobe cosmological experiments. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 494 (3). pp. 1-17. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

The goal of blinding is to hide an experiment's critical results - here the inferred cosmological parameters - until all decisions affecting its analysis have been finalized. This is especially important in the current era of precision cosmology,when the results of any newexperiment are closely scrutinized for consistency or tension with previous results. In analyses that combine multiple observational probes, like the combination of galaxy clustering and weak lensing in the Dark Energy Survey (DES), it is challenging to blind the results while retaining the ability to check for (in)consistency between different parts of the data. We propose a simple new blinding transformation, which works by modifying the summary statistics that are input to parameter estimation, such as two-point correlation functions. The transformation shifts the measured statistics to new values that are consistent with (blindly) shifted cosmological parameters while preserving internal (in)consistency. We apply the blinding transformation to simulated data for the projected DES Year 3 galaxy clustering and weak lensing analysis, demonstrating that practical blinding is achieved without significant perturbation of internalconsistency checks, asmeasured here by degradation of the χ2 between the data and best-fitting model. Our blinding method's performance is expected to improve as experiments evolve to higher precision and accuracy. © 2020 The Author(s).

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IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Desai, Shantanu	http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0466-3288

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

The analysis made use of the software tools scipy (Jones et al. 2001), numpy (Oliphant 2006), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), getdist (Lewis 2019), MULTINEST (Feroz & Hobson 2008; Feroz et al. 2009, 2013), cosmosis (Zuntz et al. 2015), and cosmolike (Krause & Eifler 2017). It was supported in part through computational resources and services provided by Advanced Research Computing at the National Science Foundation, Ann Arbor; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; and the Sherlock cluster, supported by Stanford University and the Stanford Research Computing Center. We would like to thank all of these facilities for providing computational resources and support that contributed to these research results.

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Cosmology: observations; large-scale structure of Universe; Methods: data analysis; Methods: numerical; Methods: statistical

Subjects:

Physics

Divisions:

Department of Physics

Depositing User:

. LibTrainee 2021

Date Deposited:

26 Oct 2022 14:47

Last Modified:

26 Oct 2022 14:47