Occam's razor meets WMAP

Abstract

Using a variety of quantitative implementations of Occam's razor we examine the low quadrupole, the ``axis of evil'' effect and other detections recently made appealing to the excellent WMAP data. We find that some razors {\it fully} demolish the much lauded claims for departures from scale-invariance. They all reduce to pathetic levels the evidence for a low quadrupole (or any other low $\ell$ cut-off), both in the first and third year WMAP releases. The ``axis of evil'' effect is the only anomaly examined here that survives the humiliations of Occam's razor, and even then in the category of ``strong'' rather than ``decisive'' evidence. Statistical considerations aside, differences between the various renditions of the datasets remain worrying.

References in corpus (5)

• Gauge invariant MSSM inflaton
• Measuring the effective complexity of cosmological models
• CMB multipole measurements in the presence of foregrounds
• A Bayesian model selection analysis of WMAP3
• A Quantitative Occam's Razor

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