Comparison of Bayesian inference methods using the Loreli II database of hydro-radiative simulations of the 21-cm signal

Abstract

While the observation of the 21 cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization is an instrumental challenge, the interpretation of a prospective detection is still open to questions regarding the modelling of the signal and the Bayesian inference techniques that bridge the gap between theory and observations. To address some of these questions, we present Loreli II, a database of nearly 10 000 simulations of the 21 cm signal run with the Licorice 3D radiative transfer code. With Loreli II, we explore a 5-dimensional astrophysical parameter space where star formation, X-ray emissions, and UV emissions are varied. We then use this database to train neural networks and perform Bayesian inference on 21 cm power spectra affected by thermal noise at the level of 100 hours of observation with the Square Kilometer Array. We study and compare three inference techniques : an emulator of the power spectrum, a Neural Density Estimator that fits the implicit likelihood of the model, and a Bayesian Neural Network that directly fits the posterior distribution. We measure the performances of each method by comparing them on a statistically representative set of inferences, notably using the principles of Simulation-Based Calibration. We report errors on the 1-D marginalized posteriors (biases and over/under confidence) below $15 \%$ of the standard deviation for the emulator and below $25 \%$ for the other methods. We conclude that at our noise level and our sampling density of the parameter space, an explicit Gaussian likelihood is sufficient. This may not be the case at lower noise level or if a denser sampling is used to reach higher accuracy. We then apply the emulator method to recent HERA upper limits and report weak constraints on the X-ray emissivity parameter of our model.