Using Local Likelihoods to Estimate Gravitational Lensing of the CMB

• Activity Number: 573
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining
• Author(s): Ethan Anderes*+
• Companies: University of California, Davis
• Keywords: Nonstationary random fields ; Cosmic Microwave Background ; Gravitational lensing

Abstract

This talk will present work on using local stationary approximations to estimate the dependency structure in nonstationary random fields. We will focus on the application of estimating gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a weighted local likelihood estimate of the parameters that govern the local sheer of a gravitational distortion of the CMB. The advantage of this local likelihood estimate is that it smoothly downweights the influence of far away observations, works for irregular sampling locations, and when designed appropriately, can trade bias and variance for reducing estimation error.