Use moments as a metric

[janewman-pitt-edu]

I’d suggest prioritizing somewhat different metrics than those being looked at now: in particular, the moments of the PDF are probably the most important things. In general, those moments will determine how errors in the PDFs propagate into cosmology measurements. There are plenty of analyses looking at the first couple of moments (corresponding to tests of bias in mean z and spread), but I would probably look at the 3rd and 4th moments too, at least.

[drphilmarshall]

Thanks Jeff - that's really interesting. Is there any particular *combination* of moments that you'd suggest, as a single scalar metric? We can look at the individual ones no problem.

[janewman-pitt-edu]

I think I might have failed to respond to this email? (I found it still in an open window). I think you’d want to look at each moment separately and how it propagates into shifting the cosmology (Ofer Lahav has some rules of thumb on that he likes to fall back on, at least for the first moment, I think that’s published somewhere, though the impact will depend on what redshift you’re talking about…). That’s something you can get from a simple Fisher-like calculation. Best, Jeff

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On Mar 9, 2017, at 3:41 PM, Phil Marshall ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks Jeff - that's really interesting. Is there any particular _combination_ of moments that you'd suggest, as a single scalar metric? We can look at the individual ones no problem. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[aimalz]

This is now implemented in the master branch, so I'm closing the issue.