Simultaneous Estimation of Noise and Signal in Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments

By Pedro G. Ferreira, Andrew H. Jaffe. 1999

To correctly analyse data sets from current microwave detection technology, one is forced to estimate the sky signal and experimental noise simultaneously. Given a time-ordered data set we propose a formalism and method for estimating the signal and associated errors without prior knowledge of the noise power spectrum. We derive the method using a Bayesian formalism and relate it to the standard methods; in particular we show how this leads to a change in the estimate of the noise covariance matrix of the sky signal. We study the convergence and accuracy of the method on two mock observational strategies and discuss its application to a currently-favoured calibration procedure.

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Citations in the corpus

• STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, methodology): “A better strategy is to simultaneously fit both the signal and the systematics, as is common practice in cosmology and, increasingly, in radial velocity searches for planetary systems (e.g., Ferreira & Jaffe 2000; Boisse et al. 2011; Haywood et al. 2014; Grunblatt et al. 2015).”
• High-Resolution Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum with ACBAR (2002, background): “(5) It was shown by several authors (Tegmark 1997; Ferreira & Jaffe 2000) that a maximum likelihood map is not only a good visual representation of the data, but also a lossless way to compress CMB information; the power spectra derived from the map and directly from the timestream will have the…”
• MAXIMA-1: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy on Angular Scales of 10'-5° (2000, methodology): “We used the procedure of Ferreira & Jaffe (2000) to confirm that the time-domain data are dominated by noise.”
• A High Spatial Resolution Analysis of the MAXIMA-1 Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Data (2001, methodology): “In the second method, we use the iterative noise estimation procedure of Ferreira & Jaffe (2000).”
• The cosmic microwave background anisotropy power spectrum measured by archeops (2002, background): “…subtracted from the inital TOI leaving extra signal at high frequency; (ii) due to the finite number of samples per pixel, noise remains in the map and is subtracted from the initial TOI, inducing an underestimation of the actual noise in the final TOI (Ferreira & Jaffe 2000, Stompor et al. 2002).”
• LATE-TIME COSMOLOGY WITH 21 cm INTENSITY MAPPING EXPERIMENTS (2014, methodology): “The inversion process for extracting the map from the time series (and estimating the noise) is then well defined and numerically robust (Ferreira & Jaffe 2000).”