Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

For seminars and other local announcements, please subscribe to sfu-cosmo mailing list.

Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 14:00 in P8445B

Prof. Levon Pogosian (SFU)

Fables of reconstruction: controlling bias in the dark energy equation of state

We develop an efficient, non-parametric Bayesian method for reconstructing the time evolution of the dark energy equation of state w(z) from observational data. Of particular importance is the choice of prior, which must be chosen carefully to minimise variance and bias in the reconstruction. Using a principal component analysis, we show how a correlated prior can be used to create a smooth reconstruction and also avoid bias in the mean behaviour of w(z). We test our method using Wiener reconstructions based on Fisher matrix projections, and also against more realistic MCMC analyses of simulated data sets for Planck and a Euclid-like mission.

Seminars in 2011:

2011-09-15 14:00 in P8445B - Tanmay Vachaspati (Arizona State University): Primordial magnetic fields from the electroweak epoch
2011-10-18 14:00 in P8445B - Yin-Zhe Ma (UBC): Cosmology on large and small cosmic scales
2011-10-21 15:30 in AQ3149 - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Staring at the sky (physics colloquium)
2011-10-25 14:00 in P8445B - Ali Narimani (UBC): Dimensionless cosmology
2011-11-01 14:00 in P8445B - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Critical collapse and solitons in classical conformal field theory
2011-11-15 14:00 in P8445B - Archisman Ghosh (University of Kentucky): Cosmological singularities and AdS/CFT
2011-11-22 14:00 in P8445B - Jun-Qi Guo (SFU): Scalar wave propagation in Schwarzschild metric in some usual coordinates
2011-11-25 14:30 in AQ3149 - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Lambda, w and beyond (physics colloquium)
2011-11-29 14:00 in P8445B - Daniel Thomas (Imperial College): Making gravity count: Cluster numbers and other cosmological observables in model independent modified gravity
2012-01-17 14:00 in P8445B - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Fables of reconstruction: controlling bias in the dark energy equation of state
2012-02-07 14:00 in P8445B - Scott Dodelson (Fermilab): Gravitational lensing
2012-02-23 14:00 in P8445B - Jonathan Thornburg (Indiana University): Modelling extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals for eLISA
2012-03-08 14:00 in P8445B - Jarah Evslin (IHEP, Beijing): Galaxy-sized monopoles as dark matter?

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]

Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01