Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) and I had a lunch-time conversation about her project to replace the standard large-scale-structure correlation-function estimator with a new estimator that doesn't require binning the galaxy pairs into separation bins. It estimates continuous functions. We discussed how to present such a new idea to a community that has been using the same binned estimator since the 1990s, and even before that they were only marginally different. That is, the change Storey-Fisher proposes is the biggest change to correlation-function estimation since it all started, in my (somewhat not humble) opinion.
But this creates a problem: How to convince the cosmologists that they need to learn new tricks? We have many arguments, but which one is strongest? We no longer need to bin, and binning is sinning! Or: We can capture more functional variation with fewer degrees of freedom, so we reduce simulation requirements! Or: We can restrict the function space to smooth functions, so we regularize away unphysical high-frequency components! Or: We get smaller uncertainties on the clustering at every scale! Or: We can make our continuous function components be similar to derivatives of the correlation function with respect to cosmological parameters and therefore create clustering statistics that are close to Fisher-optimal given the data and the model!
Writing methodological papers is not easy.
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