Fast Sampling of Cosmological Initial Conditions with Gaussian Neural Posterior Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Savchenko, Oleg, Abellán, Guillermo Franco, List, Florian, Montel, Noemi Anau, Weniger, Christoph
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Savchenko, Oleg
Abellán, Guillermo Franco
List, Florian
Montel, Noemi Anau
Weniger, Christoph
author_facet Savchenko, Oleg
Abellán, Guillermo Franco
List, Florian
Montel, Noemi Anau
Weniger, Christoph
contents Knowledge of the primordial matter density field from which the large-scale structure of the Universe emerged over cosmic time is of fundamental importance for cosmology. However, reconstructing these cosmological initial conditions from late-time observations is a notoriously difficult task, which requires advanced cosmological simulators and sophisticated statistical methods to explore a multi-million-dimensional parameter space. We show how simulation-based inference (SBI) can be used to tackle this problem and to obtain data-constrained realisations of the primordial dark matter density field in a simulation-efficient way with general non-differentiable simulators. Our method is applicable to full high-resolution dark matter $N$-body simulations and is based on modelling the posterior distribution of the constrained initial conditions to be Gaussian with a diagonal covariance matrix in Fourier space. As a result, we can generate thousands of posterior samples within seconds on a single GPU, orders of magnitude faster than existing methods, paving the way for sequential SBI for cosmological fields. Furthermore, we perform an analytical fit of the estimated dependence of the covariance on the wavenumber, effectively transforming any point-estimator of initial conditions into a fast sampler. We test the validity of our obtained samples by comparing them to the true values with summary statistics and performing a Bayesian consistency test.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast Sampling of Cosmological Initial Conditions with Gaussian Neural Posterior Estimation
Savchenko, Oleg
Abellán, Guillermo Franco
List, Florian
Montel, Noemi Anau
Weniger, Christoph
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Machine Learning
Knowledge of the primordial matter density field from which the large-scale structure of the Universe emerged over cosmic time is of fundamental importance for cosmology. However, reconstructing these cosmological initial conditions from late-time observations is a notoriously difficult task, which requires advanced cosmological simulators and sophisticated statistical methods to explore a multi-million-dimensional parameter space. We show how simulation-based inference (SBI) can be used to tackle this problem and to obtain data-constrained realisations of the primordial dark matter density field in a simulation-efficient way with general non-differentiable simulators. Our method is applicable to full high-resolution dark matter $N$-body simulations and is based on modelling the posterior distribution of the constrained initial conditions to be Gaussian with a diagonal covariance matrix in Fourier space. As a result, we can generate thousands of posterior samples within seconds on a single GPU, orders of magnitude faster than existing methods, paving the way for sequential SBI for cosmological fields. Furthermore, we perform an analytical fit of the estimated dependence of the covariance on the wavenumber, effectively transforming any point-estimator of initial conditions into a fast sampler. We test the validity of our obtained samples by comparing them to the true values with summary statistics and performing a Bayesian consistency test.
title Fast Sampling of Cosmological Initial Conditions with Gaussian Neural Posterior Estimation
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03139