Recovery of 21-cm intensity maps with sparse component separation

 

Authors: I.P. Carucci, M.O. Irfan, J.Bobin
Journal: MNRAS
Year: 2020
Download: ADS | arXiv

21 cm intensity mapping has emerged as a promising technique to map the large-scale structure of the Universe. However, the presence of foregrounds with amplitudes orders of magnitude larger than the cosmological signal constitutes a critical challenge. In this work, we test the sparsity-based algorithm Generalised Morphological Component Analysis (GMCA) as a blind component separation technique for this class of experiments. We test the GMCA performance against realistic full-sky mock temperature maps that include, besides astrophysical foregrounds, also a fraction of the polarized part of the signal leaked into the unpolarized one, a very troublesome foreground to subtract, usually referred to as polarization leakage. To our knowledge, this is the first time the removal of such component is performed with no prior assumption. We assess the success of the cleaning by comparing the true and recovered power spectra, in the angular and radial directions. In the best scenario looked at, GMCA is able to recover the input angular (radial) power spectrum with an average bias of 5% for >25 (2030% for k_ll ≳ 0.02 Mpc/h), in the presence of polarization leakage. Our results are robust also when up to 40% of channels are missing, mimicking a Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) flagging of the data. Having quantified the notable effect of polarisation leakage on our results, in perspective we advocate the use of more realistic simulations when testing 21 cm intensity mapping capabilities.

Code and demonstrative notebooks are available here and data-set to reproduce our results is available here.

Unsupervised feature learning for galaxy SEDs with denoising autoencoders

 

Authors: Frontera-Pons, J., Sureau, F., Bobin, J. and Le Floc'h E.
Journal: Astronomy & Astrophysics
Year: 2017
Download: ADS | arXiv


Abstract

With the increasing number of deep multi-wavelength galaxy surveys, the spectral energy distribution (SED) of galaxies has become an invaluable tool for studying the formation of their structures and their evolution. In this context, standard analysis relies on simple spectro-photometric selection criteria based on a few SED colors. If this fully supervised classification already yielded clear achievements, it is not optimal to extract relevant information from the data. In this article, we propose to employ very recent advances in machine learning, and more precisely in feature learning, to derive a data-driven diagram. We show that the proposed approach based on denoising autoencoders recovers the bi-modality in the galaxy population in an unsupervised manner, without using any prior knowledge on galaxy SED classification. This technique has been compared to principal component analysis (PCA) and to standard color/color representations. In addition, preliminary results illustrate that this enables the capturing of extra physically meaningful information, such as redshift dependence, galaxy mass evolution and variation over the specific star formation rate. PCA also results in an unsupervised representation with physical properties, such as mass and sSFR, although this representation separates out less other characteristics (bimodality, redshift evolution) than denoising autoencoders.