Semi-parametric γ-ray modeling with Gaussian processes and variational inference

10/20/2020

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by   Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, et al.

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Mismodeling the uncertain, diffuse emission of Galactic origin can seriously bias the characterization of astrophysical gamma-ray data, particularly in the region of the Inner Milky Way where such emission can make up over 80 photon counts observed at  GeV energies. We introduce a novel class of methods that use Gaussian processes and variational inference to build flexible background and signal models for gamma-ray analyses with the goal of enabling a more robust interpretation of the make-up of the gamma-ray sky, particularly focusing on characterizing potential signals of dark matter in the Galactic Center with data from the Fermi telescope.