Beyond 2pt function challenge
2/20/23-2/24/23

Workshop science content:

A wealth of information on fundamental physics is encoded in the cosmic galaxy distribution. Even though it is well-understood that the galaxy density fields is not a Gaussian random field, the majority of cosmological analyses to date have relied only on two-point statistics, i.e., they relied on not sufficient statistics. While the prospects of higher-order statistics for cosmology have been explored in theoretically, these methods are still in their infancy and considered high risk by funding agencies. The Arizona Cosmology Lab is organizing a blind data challenge to compare the performance of beyond-two-point statistics in cosmological inference. This workshop will bring together analysis teams participating in the challenge for a week of focused work homogenizing analysis assumptions, with the goal of unblinding and comparing the groups’ results at the end of the week. The results from this challenge will be published as performance benchmarks for different summary statistics and thus establish the maturity of these algorithms.