Extracting cosmological parameters from N-body simulations using machine learning techniques

Abstract

We make use of snapshots taken from the Quijote suite of simulations, consisting of 2000 simulations where five cosmological parameters have been varied ($\Omega_m$, $\Omega_b$, $h$, $n_s$ and $\sigma_8$) in order to investigate the possibility of determining them using machine learning techniques. In particular, we show that convolutional neural networks can be employed to accurately extract $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ from the N-body simulations, and that these parameters can also be found from the non-linear matter power spectrum obtained from the same suite of simulations using both random forest regressors and deep neural networks. We show that the power spectrum provides competitive results in terms of accuracy compared to using the simulations and that we can also estimate the scalar spectral index $n_s$ from the power spectrum, at a lower precision.