Imperial College London
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ProfessorRobertoTrotta

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Visiting Professor
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7793r.trotta Website CV

 
 
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Assistant

 

Mrs Sheila Ekudo +44 (0)20 7594 2086

 
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Location

 

1009Blackett LaboratorySouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{March:2011:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x,
author = {March, MC and Starkman, GD and Trotta, R and Vaudrevange, PM},
doi = {10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x},
journal = {Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
pages = {2488--2496},
title = {Should we doubt the cosmological constant?},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x},
volume = {410},
year = {2011}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - While Bayesian model selection is a useful tool to discriminate between competing cosmological models, it only gives a relative rather than an absolute measure of how good a model is. Bayesian doubt introduces an unknown benchmark model against which the known models are compared, thereby obtaining an absolute measure of model performance in a Bayesian framework. We apply this new methodology to the problem of the dark energy equation of state, comparing an absolute upper bound on the Bayesian evidence for a presently unknown dark energy model against a collection of known models including a flat Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) scenario. We find a strong absolute upper bound to the Bayes factor B between the unknown model and ΛCDM, giving B 5. The posterior probability for doubt is found to be less than 13 per cent (with a 1 per cent prior doubt) while the probability for ΛCDM rises from an initial 25 per cent to almost 70 per cent in light of the data. We conclude that ΛCDM remains a sufficient phenomenological description of currently available observations and that there is little statistical room for model improvement.
AU  - March,MC
AU  - Starkman,GD
AU  - Trotta,R
AU  - Vaudrevange,PM
DO  - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x
EP  - 2496
PY  - 2011///
SN  - 1365-2966
SP  - 2488
TI  - Should we doubt the cosmological constant?
T2  - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/29734
VL  - 410
ER  -
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