Blind Observers of the Sky

Understand

The concept of blind analysis, a key procedure to remove the human-based systematic error called confirmation bias, has long been an integral part of data analysis in many research areas.

• In cosmology, blind analysis is recently making its entrance, as the field progresses into a fully fledged high-precision science.
• The credibility, reliability and robustness of results from future sky-surveys will dramatically increase if the effect of confirmation bias is kept under control by using an appropriate blinding procedure.
• Here, we present a catalog-level blinding scheme for galaxy clustering data apt to be used in future spectroscopic galaxy surveys.