polychord: nested sampling for cosmology

By Will Handley, M. Hobson, Anthony N. Lasenby. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, 2015

396 citations recorded by the source corpus.

PolyChord is a novel nested sampling algorithm tailored for high dimensional parameter spaces. In addition, it can fully exploit a hierarchy of parameter speeds such as is found in CosmoMC and CAMB. It utilises slice sampling at each iteration to sample within the hard likelihood constraint of nested sampling. It can identify and evolve separate modes of a posterior semi-independently and is parallelised using openMPI. PolyChord is available for download at: this http URL

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dcc0d9213b68447a7960db8b4a49142e26b41b58

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Citations in the corpus

Curvature tension: Evidence for a closed universe (2019, methodology): “Bayesian evidences and posteriors are computed using nested sampling [19] provided by CosmoChord[60], an extension of CosmoMC [21] using PolyChord [27, 28] to sample efficiently in high dimensions and exploit the fastslow cosmological parameter hierarchy [61].”
Exploring cosmic origins with CORE: Inflation (2016, methodology): “We generate posterior probability distributions for the parameters using either the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm implemented in CosmoMC [179], the nested sampling algorithm MultiNest [180–182], or PolyChord, which combines nested sampling with slice sampling [183].”
Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, background): “In addition to the changes described below, Bilby now also supports the kombine (Farr & Farr 2015), ptmcmc (Ellis & van Haasteren 2017), PolyChord (Handley et al. 2015a,b), and UltraNest (Buchner 2016, 2019) samplers.”
The Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Lyα Forests (2020, methodology): “This analysis assumed flat priors for all nuisance parameters and used the nested sampler Polychord (Handley et al. 2015a, 2015b).”
First Cosmology Results using Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: Constraints on Cosmological Parameters (2018, methodology): “To evaluate consistency between our primary re- sult and BAO, we compute the evidence using PolyChord (Handley et al. 2015a,b), and compute the evidence ratio (R) defined in Eq.”
Importance Nested Sampling and the MultiNest Algorithm (2013, methodology): “In order to address this issue, a slice sampling method has been employed to draw unbiased samples efﬁciently from the likelihood-constrained prior in the P OLY C HORD (Handley et al. 2015a,b) package.”
Updated results on neutrino mass and mass hierarchy from cosmology with Planck 2018 likelihoods (2019, methodology): “We also calculate Bayesian evidences for the purpose of Bayesian model comparison between the NH and IH cases in the above cosmological models using the publicly available package CosmoChord [76], an extension to CosmoMC using PolyChord [77, 78] for nested sam-”
Improved reconstruction of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2020, methodology): “In the examples below we have used PolyChord [58, 59] as the MC sampler, via its interface with Cobaya [55].”
2020 global reassessment of the neutrino oscillation picture (2020, methodology): “We checked that MCEvidence provides accurate estimates of the Bayesian evidences using the nested sampling code PolyChord [81, 82], which is more reliable in case of multivariate distributions but requires longer computation times.”