skip to main content


Title: Neural Networks as Optimal Estimators to Marginalize Over Baryonic Effects
Abstract Many different studies have shown that a wealth of cosmological information resides on small, nonlinear scales. Unfortunately, there are two challenges to overcome to utilize that information. First, we do not know the optimal estimator that will allow us to retrieve the maximum information. Second, baryonic effects impact that regime significantly and in a poorly understood manner. Ideally, we would like to use an estimator that extracts the maximum cosmological information while marginalizing over baryonic effects. In this work we show that neural networks can achieve that when considering some simple scenarios. We made use of data where the maximum amount of cosmological information is known: power spectra and 2D Gaussian density fields. We also contaminate the data with simplified baryonic effects and train neural networks to predict the value of the cosmological parameters. For this data, we show that neural networks can (1) extract the maximum available cosmological information, (2) marginalize over baryonic effects, and (3) extract cosmological information that is buried in the regime dominated by baryonic physics. We also show that neural networks learn the priors of the data they are trained on, affecting their extrapolation properties. We conclude that a promising strategy to maximize the scientific return of cosmological experiments is to train neural networks on state-of-the-art numerical simulations with different strengths and implementations of baryonic effects.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2108944
NSF-PAR ID:
10331327
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The Astrophysical Journal
Volume:
928
Issue:
1
ISSN:
0004-637X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
44
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ABSTRACT

    We present cosmological constraints from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) first-year weak lensing shear catalogue using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and conventional summary statistics. We crop 19 $3\times 3\, \mathrm{{deg}^2}$ sub-fields from the first-year area, divide the galaxies with redshift 0.3 ≤ z ≤ 1.5 into four equally spaced redshift bins, and perform tomographic analyses. We develop a pipeline to generate simulated convergence maps from cosmological N-body simulations, where we account for effects such as intrinsic alignments (IAs), baryons, photometric redshift errors, and point spread function errors, to match characteristics of the real catalogue. We train CNNs that can predict the underlying parameters from the simulated maps, and we use them to construct likelihood functions for Bayesian analyses. In the Λ cold dark matter model with two free cosmological parameters Ωm and σ8, we find $\Omega _\mathrm{m}=0.278_{-0.035}^{+0.037}$, $S_8\equiv (\Omega _\mathrm{m}/0.3)^{0.5}\sigma _{8}=0.793_{-0.018}^{+0.017}$, and the IA amplitude $A_\mathrm{IA}=0.20_{-0.58}^{+0.55}$. In a model with four additional free baryonic parameters, we find $\Omega _\mathrm{m}=0.268_{-0.036}^{+0.040}$, $S_8=0.819_{-0.024}^{+0.034}$, and $A_\mathrm{IA}=-0.16_{-0.58}^{+0.59}$, with the baryonic parameters not being well-constrained. We also find that statistical uncertainties of the parameters by the CNNs are smaller than those from the power spectrum (5–24 per cent smaller for S8 and a factor of 2.5–3.0 smaller for Ωm), showing the effectiveness of CNNs for uncovering additional cosmological information from the HSC data. With baryons, the S8 discrepancy between HSC first-year data and Planck 2018 is reduced from $\sim 2.2\, \sigma$ to $0.3\!-\!0.5\, \sigma$.

     
    more » « less
  2. Abstract We train graph neural networks on halo catalogs from Gadget N -body simulations to perform field-level likelihood-free inference of cosmological parameters. The catalogs contain ≲5000 halos with masses ≳10 10 h −1 M ⊙ in a periodic volume of ( 25 h − 1 Mpc ) 3 ; every halo in the catalog is characterized by several properties such as position, mass, velocity, concentration, and maximum circular velocity. Our models, built to be permutationally, translationally, and rotationally invariant, do not impose a minimum scale on which to extract information and are able to infer the values of Ω m and σ 8 with a mean relative error of ∼6%, when using positions plus velocities and positions plus masses, respectively. More importantly, we find that our models are very robust: they can infer the value of Ω m and σ 8 when tested using halo catalogs from thousands of N -body simulations run with five different N -body codes: Abacus, CUBEP 3 M, Enzo, PKDGrav3, and Ramses. Surprisingly, the model trained to infer Ω m also works when tested on thousands of state-of-the-art CAMELS hydrodynamic simulations run with four different codes and subgrid physics implementations. Using halo properties such as concentration and maximum circular velocity allow our models to extract more information, at the expense of breaking the robustness of the models. This may happen because the different N -body codes are not converged on the relevant scales corresponding to these parameters. 
    more » « less
  3. ABSTRACT

    Ongoing and planned weak lensing (WL) surveys are becoming deep enough to contain information on angular scales down to a few arcmin. To fully extract information from these small scales, we must capture non-Gaussian features in the cosmological WL signal while accurately accounting for baryonic effects. In this work, we account for baryonic physics via a baryonic correction model that modifies the matter distribution in dark matter-only N-body simulations, mimicking the effects of galaxy formation and feedback. We implement this model in a large suite of ray-tracing simulations, spanning a grid of cosmological models in Ωm−σ8 space. We then develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to learn and constrain cosmological and baryonic parameters simultaneously from the simulated WL convergence maps. We find that in a Hyper-Suprime Cam-like survey, our CNN achieves a 1.7× tighter constraint in Ωm−σ8 space (1σ area) than the power spectrum and 2.1× tighter than the peak counts, showing that the CNN can efficiently extract non-Gaussian cosmological information even while marginalizing over baryonic effects. When we combine our CNN with the power spectrum, the baryonic effects degrade the constraint in Ωm−σ8 space by a factor of 2.4, compared to the much worse degradation by a factor of 4.7 or 3.7 from either method alone.

     
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    We present CAMELS-ASTRID, the third suite of hydrodynamical simulations in the Cosmology and Astrophysics with MachinE Learning (CAMELS) project, along with new simulation sets that extend the model parameter space based on the previous frameworks of CAMELS-TNG and CAMELS-SIMBA, to provide broader training sets and testing grounds for machine-learning algorithms designed for cosmological studies. CAMELS-ASTRID employs the galaxy formation model following the ASTRID simulation and contains 2124 hydrodynamic simulation runs that vary three cosmological parameters (Ωm,σ8, Ωb) and four parameters controlling stellar and active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. Compared to the existing TNG and SIMBA simulation suites in CAMELS, the fiducial model of ASTRID features the mildest AGN feedback and predicts the least baryonic effect on the matter power spectrum. The training set of ASTRID covers a broader variation in the galaxy populations and the baryonic impact on the matter power spectrum compared to its TNG and SIMBA counterparts, which can make machine-learning models trained on the ASTRID suite exhibit better extrapolation performance when tested on other hydrodynamic simulation sets. We also introduce extension simulation sets in CAMELS that widely explore 28 parameters in the TNG and SIMBA models, demonstrating the enormity of the overall galaxy formation model parameter space and the complex nonlinear interplay between cosmology and astrophysical processes. With the new simulation suites, we show that building robust machine-learning models favors training and testing on the largest possible diversity of galaxy formation models. We also demonstrate that it is possible to train accurate neural networks to infer cosmological parameters using the high-dimensional TNG-SB28 simulation set.

     
    more » « less
  5. Abstract

    Upcoming photometric surveys will discover tens of thousands of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), vastly outpacing the capacity of our spectroscopic resources. In order to maximize the scientific return of these observations in the absence of spectroscopic information, we must accurately extract key parameters, such as SN redshifts, with photometric information alone. We present Photo-zSNthesis, a convolutional neural network-based method for predicting full redshift probability distributions from multi-band supernova lightcurves, tested on both simulated Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time data as well as observed SDSS SNe. We show major improvements over predictions from existing methods on both simulations and real observations as well as minimal redshift-dependent bias, which is a challenge due to selection effects, e.g., Malmquist bias. Specifically, we show a 61× improvement in prediction bias 〈Δz〉 on PLAsTiCC simulations and 5× improvement on real SDSS data compared to results from a widely used photometric redshift estimator, LCFIT+Z. The PDFs produced by this method are well constrained and will maximize the cosmological constraining power of photometric SNe Ia samples.

     
    more » « less