103,814 research outputs found
GREAT3 results I: systematic errors in shear estimation and the impact of real galaxy morphology
We present first results from the third GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy
Testing (GREAT3) challenge, the third in a sequence of challenges for testing
methods of inferring weak gravitational lensing shear distortions from
simulated galaxy images. GREAT3 was divided into experiments to test three
specific questions, and included simulated space- and ground-based data with
constant or cosmologically-varying shear fields. The simplest (control)
experiment included parametric galaxies with a realistic distribution of
signal-to-noise, size, and ellipticity, and a complex point spread function
(PSF). The other experiments tested the additional impact of realistic galaxy
morphology, multiple exposure imaging, and the uncertainty about a
spatially-varying PSF; the last two questions will be explored in Paper II. The
24 participating teams competed to estimate lensing shears to within systematic
error tolerances for upcoming Stage-IV dark energy surveys, making 1525
submissions overall. GREAT3 saw considerable variety and innovation in the
types of methods applied. Several teams now meet or exceed the targets in many
of the tests conducted (to within the statistical errors). We conclude that the
presence of realistic galaxy morphology in simulations changes shear
calibration biases by per cent for a wide range of methods. Other
effects such as truncation biases due to finite galaxy postage stamps, and the
impact of galaxy type as measured by the S\'{e}rsic index, are quantified for
the first time. Our results generalize previous studies regarding sensitivities
to galaxy size and signal-to-noise, and to PSF properties such as seeing and
defocus. Almost all methods' results support the simple model in which additive
shear biases depend linearly on PSF ellipticity.Comment: 32 pages + 15 pages of technical appendices; 28 figures; submitted to
MNRAS; latest version has minor updates in presentation of 4 figures, no
changes in content or conclusion
An Iterative Scheme for Leverage-based Approximate Aggregation
The current data explosion poses great challenges to the approximate
aggregation with an efficiency and accuracy. To address this problem, we
propose a novel approach to calculate the aggregation answers with a high
accuracy using only a small portion of the data. We introduce leverages to
reflect individual differences in the samples from a statistical perspective.
Two kinds of estimators, the leverage-based estimator, and the sketch estimator
(a "rough picture" of the aggregation answer), are in constraint relations and
iteratively improved according to the actual conditions until their difference
is below a threshold. Due to the iteration mechanism and the leverages, our
approach achieves a high accuracy. Moreover, some features, such as not
requiring recording the sampled data and easy to extend to various execution
modes (e.g., the online mode), make our approach well suited to deal with big
data. Experiments show that our approach has an extraordinary performance, and
when compared with the uniform sampling, our approach can achieve high-quality
answers with only 1/3 of the same sample size.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure
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