deep21: a Deep Learning Method for 21cm Foreground Removal
This addresses the challenge of analyzing 21cm intensity maps for upcoming radio experiments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods applied to simulated data.
The paper tackled the problem of removing foreground contaminants from 21cm intensity mapping observations, achieving cleaned maps that recover cosmological clustering statistics within 10% at all relevant scales and reduce prediction variance by over an order of magnitude on small angular scales compared to standard PCA methods.
We seek to remove foreground contaminants from 21cm intensity mapping observations. We demonstrate that a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with a UNet architecture and three-dimensional convolutions, trained on simulated observations, can effectively separate frequency and spatial patterns of the cosmic neutral hydrogen (HI) signal from foregrounds in the presence of noise. Cleaned maps recover cosmological clustering statistics within 10% at all relevant angular scales and frequencies. This amounts to a reduction in prediction variance of over an order of magnitude on small angular scales ($\ell > 300$), and improved accuracy for small radial scales ($k_{\parallel} > 0.17\ \rm h\ Mpc^{-1})$ compared to standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methods. We estimate posterior confidence intervals for the network's prediction by training an ensemble of UNets. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of analyzing 21cm intensity maps, as opposed to derived summary statistics, for upcoming radio experiments, as long as the simulated foreground model is sufficiently realistic. We provide the code used for this analysis on Github https://github.com/tlmakinen/deep21 as well as a browser-based tutorial for the experiment and UNet model via the accompanying http://bit.ly/deep21-colab Colab notebook.