Predicting extragalactic distance errors using Bayesian inference in multi-measurement catalogs

Abstract

We propose the use of robust, Bayesian methods for estimating extragalactic distance errors in multi-measurement catalogs. We seek to improve upon the more commonly used frequentist propagation-of-error methods, as they fail to explain both the scatter between different measurements and the effects of skewness in the metric distance probability distribution. For individual galaxies, the most transparent way to assess the variance of redshift independent distances is to directly sample the posterior probability distribution obtained from the mixture of reported measurements. However, sampling the posterior can be cumbersome for catalog-wide precision cosmology applications. We compare the performance of frequentist methods versus our proposed measures for estimating the true variance of the metric distance probability distribution. We provide pre-computed distance error data tables for galaxies in 3 catalogs: NED-D, HyperLEDA, and Cosmicflows-3. Additionally, we develop a Bayesian model that considers systematic and random effects in the estimation of errors for Tully-Fisher relation (TF) derived distances in NED-D. We validate this model with a Bayesian $p$-value computed using the Freeman-Tukey discrepancy measure as a posterior predictive check. We are then able to predict distance errors for 884 galaxies in the NED-D catalog and 203 galaxies in the HyperLEDA catalog which do not report TF distance modulus errors. Our goal is that our estimated and predicted errors are used in catalog-wide applications that require acknowledging the true variance of extragalactic distance measurements.