Considerations in the Interpretation of Cosmological Anomalies

Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" --- combined with increasingly large datasets, the widespread use of ad hoc estimators for anomaly detection, and the "look-elsewhere" effect, can lead to spurious false detections. In this informal note, I argue that anomaly detection leading to discoveries of new physics requires a combination of physical understanding, careful experimental design to avoid confirmation bias, and self-consistent statistical methods. These points are illustrated with several concrete examples from cosmology.Comment: An informal summary of an invited talk given at the IAU symposium "Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology", accepted in the Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 306, 2014 (A.F. Heavens, J.-L. Starck, A. Krone-Martins eds.). 7 pages, 1 figure. Comments welcom

The cut-sky cosmic microwave background is not anomalous

The observed angular correlation function of the cosmic microwave background has previously been reported to be anomalous, particularly when measured in regions of the sky uncontaminated by Galactic emission. Recent work by Efstathiou et al. presents a Bayesian comparison of isotropic theories, casting doubt on the significance of the purported anomaly. We extend this analysis to all anisotropic Gaussian theories with vanishing mean ( = 0), using the much wider class of models to confirm that the anomaly is not likely to point to new physics. On the other hand if there is any new physics to be gleaned, it results from low-l alignments which will be better quantified by a full-sky statistic. We also consider quadratic maximum likelihood power spectrum estimators that are constructed assuming isotropy. The underlying assumptions are therefore false if the ensemble is anisotropic. Nonetheless we demonstrate that, for theories compatible with the observed sky, these estimators (while no longer optimal) remain statistically superior to pseudo-C_l power spectrum estimators.Comment: PRD in press. Extremely minor updates, mirroring typographical changes made in proo

Exploiting the full potential of photometric quasar surveys: Optimal power spectra through blind mitigation of systematics

We present optimal measurements of the angular power spectrum of the XDQSOz catalogue of photometric quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These measurements rely on a quadratic maximum likelihood estimator that simultaneously measures the auto- and cross-power spectra of four redshift samples, and provides minimum-variance, unbiased estimates even at the largest angular scales. Since photometric quasars are known to be strongly affected by systematics such as spatially-varying depth and stellar contamination, we introduce a new framework of extended mode projection to robustly mitigate the impact of systematics on the power spectrum measurements. This technique involves constructing template maps of potential systematics, decorrelating them on the sky, and projecting out modes which are significantly correlated with the data. Our method is able to simultaneously process several thousands of nonlinearly-correlated systematics, and mode projection is performed in a blind fashion. Using our final power spectrum measurements, we find a good agreement with theoretical predictions, and no evidence for further contamination by systematics. Extended mode projection not only obviates the need for aggressive sky and quality cuts, but also provides control over the level of systematics in the measurements, enabling the search for small signals of new physics while avoiding confirmation bias.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures. v2: version accepted by MNRAS. v3: systematics templates publicly available on www.earlyuniverse.org/code, no change to pape

No new cosmological concordance with massive sterile neutrinos

It has been claimed recently that massive sterile neutrinos could bring about a new concordance between observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, and local measurements of the Hubble constant, $H_0$. We demonstrate that this apparent concordance results from combining datasets which are in significant tension, even within this extended model, possibly indicating remaining systematic biases in the measurements. We further show that this tension remains when the cosmological model is further extended to include significant tensor modes, as suggested by the recent BICEP2 results. Using the Bayesian evidence, we show that the minimal $\Lambda$CDM model is strongly favoured over its neutrino extensions by various combinations of datasets. Robust data combinations yield stringent limits of $\sum m_\nu\lesssim0.3$ eV and $m_{\nu,{\rm sterile}}^{\rm eff} \lesssim 0.3$ eV at $95\%$ CL for the sum of active and sterile neutrinos, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, version accepted by PR