Neural network (NN) emulators of the global 21 cm signal need an emulation error much less than the observational noise in order to be used to perform unbiased Bayesian parameter inference. To this end, we introduce 21cmLSTM—a long short-term memory (LSTM) NN emulator of the global 21 cm signal that leverages the intrinsic correlation between frequency channels to achieve exceptional accuracy compared to previous emulators, which are all feedforward, fully connected NNs. LSTM NNs are a type of recurrent NN designed to capture long-term dependencies in sequential data. When trained and tested on the same simulated set of global 21 cm signals as the best previous emulators, 21cmLSTM has an average relative rms error of 0.22%—equivalently 0.39 mK—and comparably fast evaluation time. We perform seven-dimensional Bayesian parameter estimation analyses using 21cmLSTM to fit global 21 cm signal mock data with different adopted observational noise levels, σ21. The posterior 1σ rms error is ≈three times less than σ21 for each fit and consistently decreases for tighter noise levels, showing that 21cmLSTM can sufficiently exploit even very optimistic measurements of the global 21 cm signal. We have made the emulator, code, and data sets publicly available so that 21cmLSTM can be independently tested and used to retrain and constrain other 21 cm models.
21cmlstm: A Fast Memory-based Emulator of the Global 21 cm Signal with Unprecedented Accuracy
Abstract
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© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous reviewer for the thorough feedback that improved the manuscript. We thank Christian H. Bye, Harry T. J. Bevins, and Joshua Hibbard for useful discussions. This work utilized the Blanca condo computing resource at the University of Colorado Boulder. Blanca is jointly funded by computing users and the University of Colorado Boulder. This work was directly supported by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute cooperative agreement 80ARC017M0006. We acknowledge support by NASA APRA grant award 80NSSC23K0013 and a subcontract from UC Berkeley (NASA award 80MSFC23CA015) to the University of Colorado (subcontract #00011385) for science investigations involving the LuSEE-Night lunar farside mission. J.M. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA. Part of this work was done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).
Software References
This research relies heavily on the Python (G. Van Rossum & F. L. Drake 1995) open-source community libraries numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), scipy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020), tensorflow (M. Abadi et al. 2015), and Keras (F. Chollet et al. 2015). This research also utilized jupyter (T. Kluyver et al. 2016), MultiNest (F. Feroz et al. 2009, 2019), 21cmVAE (C. H. Bye et al. 2022), and globalemu (H. T. J. Bevins et al. 2021).
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Dorigo_Jones_2024_ApJ_977_19.pdf
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Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2410.07619 (arXiv)
Funding
- University of Colorado Boulder
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80ARC017M0006
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC23K0013
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80MSFC23CA015
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 00011385
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NASA Postdoctoral Program
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NM0018D0004
Dates
- Accepted
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2024-10-08Accepted
- Available
-
2024-11-28Published
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- Published