Stochastic reconstructions of spectral functions: Application to lattice QCD

Understand

We present a detailed study of the applications of two stochastic approaches, stochastic optimization method (SOM) and stochastic analytical inference (SAI), to extract spectral functions from Euclidean correlation functions.

• SOM has the advantage that it does not require prior information.
• On the other hand, SAI is a more generalized method based on Bayesian inference.
• Under mean field approximation SAI reduces to the often-used maximum entropy method (MEM), and for a specific choice of the prior SAI becomes equivalent to SOM.