Methods for Bayesian power spectrum inference with galaxy surveys

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive Bayesian method for inferring the cosmological power spectrum from galaxy surveys, accounting for uncertainties and biases, and demonstrating its effectiveness on mock data resembling SDSS data.

Contribution

It introduces a joint Bayesian inference framework that simultaneously estimates the density field, power spectrum, and galaxy biases, improving accuracy over previous methods.

Findings

Successfully tested on mock SDSS-like data.

Revealed anti-correlation between bias and power spectrum affecting estimates.

Achieved high efficiency in high-dimensional parameter space.

Abstract

We derive and implement a full Bayesian large scale structure inference method aiming at precision recovery of the cosmological power spectrum from galaxy redshift surveys. Our approach improves over previous Bayesian methods by performing a joint inference of the three dimensional density field, the cosmological power spectrum, luminosity dependent galaxy biases and corresponding normalizations. We account for all joint and correlated uncertainties between all inferred quantities. Classes of galaxies with different biases are treated as separate sub samples. The method therefore also allows the combined analysis of more than one galaxy survey. In particular, it solves the problem of inferring the power spectrum from galaxy surveys with non-trivial survey geometries by exploring the joint posterior distribution with efficient implementations of multiple block Markov chain and Hybrid Monte Carlo methods. Our Markov sampler achieves high statistical efficiency in low signal to noise regimes by using a deterministic reversible jump algorithm. We test our method on an artificial mock galaxy survey, emulating characteristic features of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7, such as its survey geometry and luminosity dependent biases. These tests demonstrate the numerical feasibility of our large scale Bayesian inference frame work when the parameter space has millions of dimensions. The method reveals and correctly treats the anti-correlation between bias amplitudes and power spectrum, which are not taken into account in current approaches to power spectrum estimation, a 20 percent effect across large ranges in k-space. In addition, the method results in constrained realizations of density fields obtained without assuming the power spectrum or bias parameters in advance.