STA250 - Statistics of the Cosmic Microwave Background

UC Davis, spring 2016

Instructor:

Ethan Anderes (from the Department of Statistics)

Units: 4.0

Lectures:

2:10pm - 4pm MW in Math Sciences Building 1139

Grading:

Coding projects (written in Julia) and a final project/presentation.

Description:

In this course we will study the statistics involved with analyzing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We will focus on Bayesian methods, the theory of random fields, the physical theory of the CMB, computational methods for working with densely observed random fields and the new scientific programing language Julia.

Here is a list of the possible topics we will cover:

Spherical harmonic transform and the fast Fourier transform;
Wiener filtering, map making, foregrounds and source separation;
MCMC techniques for sampling from posteriors;
High resolution simulation;
Gibbs sampling, interweaving ancillary-sufficient parameterizations, Rao-blackwellization;
Bayes Factors and Beta mixtures for model selection;
Nested Sampling;
Hamiltonian Markov chain for high dimensional posteriors;
Lensing;
Detecting and characterizing non-Gaussian random fields;
Cross-correlating fields and null tests;
ISW effect;
Explicit code for downloading and analyzing Planck and SPT data;
Approximate Bayesian Methods.