Compressed ‘CMB-lite’ Likelihoods Using Automatic Differentiation

The compression of multi-frequency cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum measurements into a series of foreground-marginalised CMB-only band powers allows for the construction of faster and more easily interpretable ‘lite’ likelihoods. However, obtaining the compressed data vector is computationally expensive and yields a covariance matrix with sampling noise. In this work, we present an implementation of the CMB-lite framework relying on automatic differentiation. The technique presented reduces the computational cost of the lite likelihood construction to one minimisation and one Hessian evaluation, which run on a personal computer in about a minute. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of this procedure by applying it to the differentiable SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EE likelihood from the candl library. We find good agreement between the marginalised posteriors of cosmological parameters yielded by the resulting lite likelihood and the reference multi-frequency version for all cosmological models tested; the best-fit values shift by \(<0.1\,\sigma\), where \(\sigma\) is the width of the multi-frequency posterior, and the inferred parameter error bars match to within \(<10\%\). We publicly release the SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EE lite likelihood and a python notebook showing its construction at https://github.com/Lbalkenhol/candl .