Data-driven Cosmology from Three-dimensional Light Cones

Abstract

We present a data-driven technique to analyze multifrequency images from upcoming cosmological surveys mapping large sky area. Using full information from the data at the two-point level, our method can simultaneously constrain the large-scale structure (LSS), the spectra and redshift distribution of emitting sources, and the noise in the observed data without any prior assumptions beyond the homogeneity and isotropy of cosmological perturbations. In particular, the method does not rely on source detection or photometric or spectroscopic redshift estimates. Here, we present the formalism and demonstrate our technique with a mock observation from nine optical and near-infrared photometric bands. Our method can recover the input signal and noise without bias, and quantify the uncertainty on the constraints. Our technique provides a flexible framework to analyze the LSS observation traced by different types of sources, which has potential for wide application to current or future cosmological datasets such as SPHEREx, Rubin Observatory, Euclid, or the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.