CosmosClub Erwan Allys
Date: July 2nd 2020, 10.00 a.m.
Speaker: Erwan Allys (ENS Paris / École Normale Supérieure, Laboratoire de Radioastronomie )
Title: The Wavelet Phase Harmonics, a new interpretable statistical description for analysis and synthesis of the LSS
Room: Zoom Meeting (connection details will be updated soon)
Abstract
The statistical characterization of non-Gaussian fields is a major problem in current astrophysics, and no method has clearly emerged up to now to do so. In this presentation, I will introduce the Wavelet Phase Harmonics (WPH), a low-dimensional and interpretable set of statistics that efficiently characterizes the couplings between scales in non-linear processes. This description, that has been recently introduced in data science, is inspired from neural networks. Applied to projected matter density field from Quijote N-body Large Scale Structure (LSS) simulations, I will show how the WPH are able to provide better constraints on five cosmological parameters than the joint power spectrum and bispectrum, as well as to produce new realistic statistical syntheses from a maximum-entropy model. These results open the path to the use of a new type of statistical description for non-Gaussian fields in astrophysics.
