Fast and effortless computation of profile likelihoods using CONNECT

Understand

The frequentist method of profile likelihoods has recently received renewed attention in the field of cosmology.

• This is because the results of inferences based on the latter may differ from those of Bayesian inferences, either because of prior choices or because of non-Gaussianity in the likelihood function.
• Consequently, both methods are required for a fully nuanced analysis.
• However, in the last decades, cosmological parameter estimation has largely been dominated by Bayesian statistics due to the numerical complexity of constructing profile likelihoods, arising mainly from the need for a large number of gradient-free optimisations of the likelihood function.