Impact of weak-lensing mass-mapping algorithms on cosmology inference

TL;DR

This study evaluates how different weak-lensing mass-mapping algorithms influence the accuracy of cosmological parameter inference, highlighting that advanced methods like MCALens significantly improve constraints by better capturing small-scale structures.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of mass-mapping algorithms' impact on cosmological inference, demonstrating the benefits of advanced algorithms like MCALens over traditional methods.

Findings

MCALens improves cosmological constraints by up to 157% over Kaiser-Squires.

Inpainting Kaiser-Squires offers similar results to Kaiser-Squires, with limited benefits.

Algorithm choice critically affects the precision of cosmological parameter estimates.

Abstract

Weak-lensing mass-mapping algorithms, which reconstruct the convergence field from galaxy shear measurements, are crucial for extracting higher-order statistics to constrain cosmological parameters. However, only limited research has explored whether the choice of mass-mapping algorithm affects the inference of cosmological parameters from weak-lensing higher-order statistics. This study aims to evaluate the impact of different mass-mapping algorithms on the inference of cosmological parameters measured with weak-lensing peak counts. We employ Kaiser-Squires, inpainting Kaiser-Squires, and MCALens mass-mapping algorithms to reconstruct the convergence field from simulated weak-lensing data. Using these maps, we compute the peak counts and wavelet peak counts as data vectors and perform Bayesian analysis with MCMC sampling to estimate posterior distributions of cosmological parameters. Our results indicate that the choice of mass-mapping algorithm significantly affects the constraints on cosmological parameters, with the MCALens method improving constraints by up to 157$\%$ compared to the standard Kaiser-Squires method. This improvement arises from MCALens' ability to better capture small-scale structures. In contrast, inpainting Kaiser-Squires yields constraints similar to Kaiser-Squires, indicating a limited benefit from inpainting for cosmological parameter estimation with peaks. The accuracy of mass-mapping algorithms is thus critical for cosmological inference from weak-lensing data. Advanced algorithms like MCALens, which offer superior reconstruction of the convergence field, can substantially enhance the precision of cosmological parameter estimates. These findings underscore the importance of selecting appropriate mass-mapping techniques in weak-lensing studies to fully exploit the potential of higher-order statistics for cosmological research.