Robustness of Neural Ratio and Posterior Estimators to Distributional Shifts for Population-Level Dark Matter Analysis in Strong Gravitational Lensing

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Filipp, Andreas, Hezaveh, Yashar, Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909893608341504
author Filipp, Andreas
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
author_facet Filipp, Andreas
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
contents We investigate the robustness of Neural Ratio Estimators (NREs) and Neural Posterior Estimators (NPEs) to distributional shifts in the context of measuring the abundance of dark matter subhalos using strong gravitational lensing data. While these data-driven inference frameworks can be accurate on test data from the same distribution as the training sets, in real applications, it is expected that simulated training data and true observational data will differ in their distributions. We explore the behavior of a trained NRE and trained sequential NPEs to estimate the population-level parameters of dark matter subhalos from a large sample of images of strongly lensed galaxies with test data presenting distributional shifts within and beyond the bounds of the training distribution in the nuisance parameters (e.g., the background source morphology). While our results show that NREs and NPEs perform well when tested perfectly in distribution, they exhibit significant biases when confronted with slight deviations from the examples seen in the training distribution. This indicates the necessity for caution when applying NREs and NPEs to real astrophysical data, where high-dimensional underlying distributions are not perfectly known.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_05905
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robustness of Neural Ratio and Posterior Estimators to Distributional Shifts for Population-Level Dark Matter Analysis in Strong Gravitational Lensing
Filipp, Andreas
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
We investigate the robustness of Neural Ratio Estimators (NREs) and Neural Posterior Estimators (NPEs) to distributional shifts in the context of measuring the abundance of dark matter subhalos using strong gravitational lensing data. While these data-driven inference frameworks can be accurate on test data from the same distribution as the training sets, in real applications, it is expected that simulated training data and true observational data will differ in their distributions. We explore the behavior of a trained NRE and trained sequential NPEs to estimate the population-level parameters of dark matter subhalos from a large sample of images of strongly lensed galaxies with test data presenting distributional shifts within and beyond the bounds of the training distribution in the nuisance parameters (e.g., the background source morphology). While our results show that NREs and NPEs perform well when tested perfectly in distribution, they exhibit significant biases when confronted with slight deviations from the examples seen in the training distribution. This indicates the necessity for caution when applying NREs and NPEs to real astrophysical data, where high-dimensional underlying distributions are not perfectly known.
title Robustness of Neural Ratio and Posterior Estimators to Distributional Shifts for Population-Level Dark Matter Analysis in Strong Gravitational Lensing
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05905