BibTeX
@article{2407.15923v1,
Author = {Benjamin M. Boyd and Matthew Grayling and Stephen Thorp and Kaisey S. Mandel},
Title = {Accounting for Selection Effects in Supernova Cosmology with
Simulation-Based Inference and Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling},
Eprint = {2407.15923v1},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass = {astro-ph.CO},
Abstract = {Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are thermonuclear exploding stars that can be
used to put constraints on the nature of our universe. One challenge with
population analyses of SNe Ia is Malmquist bias, where we preferentially
observe the brighter SNe due to limitations of our telescopes. If untreated,
this bias can propagate through to our posteriors on cosmological parameters.
In this paper, we develop a novel technique of using a normalising flow to
learn the non-analytical likelihood of observing a SN Ia for a given survey
from simulations, that is independent of any cosmological model. The learnt
likelihood is then used in a hierarchical Bayesian model with Hamiltonian Monte
Carlo sampling to put constraints on different sets of cosmological parameters
conditioned on the observed data. We verify this technique on toy model
simulations finding excellent agreement with analytically-derived posteriors to
within $1 \sigma$.},
Year = {2024},
Month = {Jul},
Url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15923v1},
File = {2407.15923v1.pdf}
}