Dark Energy Survey internal consistency tests of the joint cosmological probes analysis with posterior predictive distributions
Creators: name: Doux, C.
name: Baxter, E.
name: Lemos, P.
name: Chang, C.
name: Alarcon, A.
name: Amon, A.
name: Campos, A.
name: Choi, A.
name: Gatti, M.
name: Gruen, D.
name: Jarvis, M.
name: MacCrann, N.
name: Park, Y.
name: Prat, J.
name: Rau, M. M.
name: Raveri, M.
name: Samuroff, S.
name: DeRose, J.
name: Hartley, W. G.
name: Hoyle, B.
name: Troxel, M. A.
name: Zuntz, J.
name: Abbott, T. M. C.
name: Aguena, M.
name: Allam, S.
name: Annis, J.
name: Avila, S.
name: Bacon, D.
name: Bertin, E.
name: Bhargava, S.
name: Brooks, D.
name: Burke, D. L.
name: Kind, M. Carrasco
name: Carretero, J.
name: Cawthon, R.
name: Costanzi, M.
name: da Costa, L. N.
name: Pereira, M. E. S.
name: Desai, S.
name: Diehl, H. T.
name: Dietrich, J. P.
name: Doel, P.
name: Everett, S.
name: Ferrero, I.
name: Fosalba, P.
name: Frieman, J.
name: García-Bellido, J.
name: Gerdes, D. W.
name: Giannantonio, T.
name: Gruendl, R. A.
name: Gschwend, J.
name: Gutierrez, G.
name: Hinton, S. R.
name: Hollowood, D. L.
name: Honscheid, K.
name: Huff, E. M.
name: Huterer, D.
name: Jain, B.
name: James, D. J.
name: Krause, E.
name: Kuehn, K.
name: Kuropatkin, N.
name: Lahav, O.
name: Lidman, C.
name: Lima, M.
name: Maia, M. A. G.
name: Menanteau, F.
name: Miquel, R.
name: Morgan, R.
name: Muir, J.
name: Ogando, R. L. C.
name: Palmese, A.
name: Paz-Chinchón, F.
name: Plazas, A. A.
name: Sanchez, E.
name: Scarpine, V.
name: Schubnell, M.
name: Serrano, S.
name: Sevilla-Noarbe, I.
name: Smith, M.
name: Suchyta, E.
name: Swanson, M. E. C.
name: Tarle, G.
name: To, C.
name: Tucker, D. L.
name: Varga, T. N.
name: Weller, J.
name: Wilkinson, R. D.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Beyond-$Λ$CDM physics or systematic errors may cause subsets of a cosmological data set to appear inconsistent when analyzed assuming $Λ$CDM. We present an application of internal consistency tests to measurements from the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 (DES Y1) joint probes analysis. Our analysis relies on computing the posterior predictive distribution (PPD) for these data under the assumption of $Λ$CDM. We find that the DES Y1 data have an acceptable goodness of fit to $Λ$CDM, with a probability of finding a worse fit by random chance of ${p = 0.046}$. Using numerical PPD tests, supplemented by graphical checks, we show that most of the data vector appears completely consistent with expectations, although we observe a small tension between large- and small-scale measurements. A small part (roughly 1.5%) of the data vector shows an unusually large departure from expectations; excluding this part of the data has negligible impact on cosmological constraints, but does significantly improve the $p$-value to 0.10. The methodology developed here will be applied to test the consistency of DES Year 3 joint probes data sets.
description: v2: Minor modification in calibration methodology; conclusions unchanged. v3: Matches version accepted in MNRAS; generalises calibration of p-values, while leaving qualitative conclusions unchanged. Comments are welcome