{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/colfi-cosmological-likelihood-free-inference","title":"CoLFI: Cosmological Likelihood-free Inference with Neural Density Estimators","arxiv_id":"2306.11102","date":"2023-06-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Guo-Jian Wang","Cheng Cheng","Yin-Zhe Ma","Jun-Qing Xia","Amare Abebe","Aroonkumar Beesham"],"abstract":"In previous works, we proposed to estimate cosmological parameters with the artificial neural network (ANN) and the mixture density network (MDN). In this work, we propose an improved method called the mixture neural network (MNN) to achieve parameter estimation by combining ANN and MDN, which can overcome shortcomings of the ANN and MDN methods. Besides, we propose sampling parameters in a hyper-ellipsoid for the generation of the training set, which makes the parameter estimation more efficient. A high-fidelity posterior distribution can be obtained using $\\mathcal{O}(10^2)$ forward simulation samples. In addition, we develop a code-named CoLFI for parameter estimation, which incorporates the advantages of MNN, ANN, and MDN, and is suitable for any parameter estimation of complicated models in a wide range of scientific fields. CoLFI provides a more efficient way for parameter estimation, especially for cases where the likelihood function is intractable or cosmological models are complex and resource-consuming. It can learn the conditional probability density $p(\\boldsymbol\\theta|\\boldsymbol{d})$ using samples generated by models, and the posterior distribution $p(\\boldsymbol\\theta|\\boldsymbol{d}_0)$ can be obtained for a given observational data $\\boldsymbol{d}_0$. We tested the MNN using power spectra of the cosmic microwave background and Type Ia supernovae and obtained almost the same result as the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. The numerical difference only exists at the level of $\\mathcal{O}(10^{-2}\\sigma)$. The method can be extended to higher-dimensional data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11102v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.11102v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"colfi-cosmological-likelihood-free-inference","repo_url":"https://github.com/guo-jian-wang/colfi","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.11102","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2306.11102"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/guo-jian-wang/colfi","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"7174be20f9cfb32e","entry":"get_data","repo":"guo-jian-wang/colfi","repo_kind":"official","path":"examples/linear/train_linear.py","file_url":"https://github.com/guo-jian-wang/colfi/blob/HEAD/examples/linear/train_linear.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"7174be20f9cfb32e"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}