latent variable models, weak lensing

The day started with a call with Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI-IS), Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA), and Markus Bonse (Darmstadt) to discuss taking Christina Eilers's (MPIA) problem of modeling spectra with partial labels over to a latent-variable model, probably starting with the GPLVM. We discussed data format and how we might start. There is a lot of work in astronomy using GANs and deep learning to make data generators. These are great, but we are betting it will be easier to put causal structure that we care about into the latent-variable model.

At Cosmology & Data Group Meeting at Flatiron, the whole group discussed the big batch of weak lensing results released by the Dark Energy Survey last month. A lot of the discussion was about understanding the covariances of the likelihood information coming from the weak lensing. This is a bit hard to understand, because everyone uses highly informative priors (for good reasons, of course) from prior data. We also discussed the multiplicative bias and other biases in shape measurement; how might we constrain these independently from the cosmological parameters themselves? Data simulations, of course, but most of us would like to see a measurement to constrain them.

At the end of Cosmology Meeting, Ben Wandelt (Flatiron) and I spent time discussing projects of mutual interest. In particular we discussed dimensionality reduction related to galaxy morphologies and spatially resolved spectroscopy, in part inspired by the weak-lensing discussion, and also the future of Euclid.