Persistent homology in cosmic shear: Constraining parameters with topological data analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, cosmic shear has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the statistical distribution of matter in our Universe. Apart from the standard two-point correlation functions, several alternative methods such as peak count statistics offer competitive results. Here we show that persistent homology, a tool from topological data analysis, can extract more cosmological information than previous methods from the same data set. For this, we use persistent Betti numbers to efficiently summarise the full topological structure of weak lensing aperture mass maps. This method can be seen as an extension of the peak count statistics, in which we additionally capture information about the environment surrounding the maxima. We first demonstrate the performance in a mock analysis of the KiDS+VIKING-450 data: We extract the Betti functions from a suite of N-body simulations and use these to train a Gaussian process emulator that provides rapid model predictions; we next run a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis on independent mock data to infer the cosmological parameters and their uncertainties. When comparing our results, we recover the input cosmology and achieve a constraining power on $ S_8 \equiv \sigma_8 \sqrt{\Omega_{\mathrm{m}}/0.3} $ that is 3% tighter than that on peak count statistics. Performing the same analysis on 100 deg2 of Euclid-like simulations, we are able to improve the constraints on S8 and Ωm by 19% and 12%, respectively, while breaking some of the degeneracy between S8 and the dark energy equation of state. To our knowledge, the methods presented here are the most powerful topological tools for constraining cosmological parameters with lensing data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".