Fast optimal CMB power spectrum estimation with Hamiltonian sampling

Abstract

We present a method for fast optimal estimation of the temperature angular power spectrum from observations of the cosmic microwave background. We employ a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampler to obtain samples from the posterior probability distribution of all the power spectrum coefficients given a set of observations. We compare the properties of the HMC and the related Gibbs sampling approach on low-resolution simulations and find that the HMC method performs favourably even in the regime of relatively low signal-to-noise. We also demonstrate the method on high-resolution data by applying it to simulated WMAP data. Analysis of a WMAP-sized data set is possible in a around eighty hours on a high-end desktop computer. HMC imposes few conditions on the distribution to be sampled and provides us with an extremely flexible approach upon which to build.

9 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Content changed in response to reviewers comments and new developments

References in corpus (2)

• Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Three Year Results: Implications for Cosmology
• Efficient Cosmological Parameter Estimation with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

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