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Disconnected pseudo-C_ell covariances for projected large-scale structure data

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arxiv 1906.11765 v2 pith:TTTOG6OY submitted 2019-06-27 astro-ph.CO astro-ph.IM

Disconnected pseudo-C_ell covariances for projected large-scale structure data

classification astro-ph.CO astro-ph.IM
keywords covariancematrixmethodsdatagaussianpoweraccuracyalgorithms
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The disconnected part of the power spectrum covariance matrix (also known as the "Gaussian" covariance) is the dominant contribution on large scales for galaxy clustering and weak lensing datasets. The presence of a complicated sky mask causes non-trivial correlations between different Fourier/harmonic modes, which must be accurately characterized in order to obtain reliable cosmological constraints. This is particularly relevant for galaxy survey data. Unfortunately, an exact calculation of these correlations involves $O(\ell_{\rm max}^6)$ operations that become computationally impractical very quickly. We present an implementation of approximate methods to estimate the Gaussian covariance matrix of power spectra involving spin-0 and spin-2 flat- and curved-sky fields, expanding on existing algorithms. These methods achieve an $O(\ell_{\rm max}^3)$ scaling, which makes the computation of the covariance matrix as fast as the computation of the power spectrum itself. We quantify the accuracy of these methods on large-scale structure and weak lensing data, making use of a large number of Gaussian but otherwise realistic simulations. We show that, using the approximate covariance matrix, we are able to recover the true posterior distribution of cosmological parameters to high accuracy. We also quantify the shortcomings of these methods, which become unreliable on the very largest scales, as well as for covariance matrix elements involving cosmic shear $B$ modes. The algorithms presented here are implemented in the public code NaMaster (https://github.com/LSSTDESC/NaMaster).

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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