Normalizing flows for random fields in cosmology

Abstract

Normalizing flows are a powerful tool to create flexible probability distributions with a wide range of potential applications in cosmology. Here we are studying normalizing flows which represent cosmological observables at field level, rather than at the level of summary statistics such as the power spectrum. We evaluate the performance of different normalizing flows for both density estimation and sampling of near-Gaussian random fields, and check the quality of samples with different statistics such as power spectrum and bispectrum estimators. We explore aspects of these flows that are specific to cosmology, such as flowing from a physical prior distribution and evaluating the density estimation results in the analytically tractable correlated Gaussian case.