Fisher Matrix Toolbox (Fisher4Cast )

General Fisher Matrix Toolbox and GUI

Fisher4Cast

Authors: Bruce A. Bassett, Yabebal Fantaye, Renee Hlozek and Jacques Kotze

The Fisher4Cast suite provides a standard, tested tool set for general Fisher Information matrix prediction and forecasting for use in both research and education. The toolbox design is robust and modular, allowing for easy additions and adaptation while keeping the user interface intuitive and easy to use. Fisher4Cast is completely general but the default code is written for cosmology. It provides parameter error forecasts for cosmological surveys that provide distance, Hubble expansion and growth measurements in a general, curved FLRW background. See the accompanying paper, http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0993 , for further details and examples of novel applications in Observational Cosmology.



The release package contains documentation (Manual, Quickstart guide and sample code to produce figures) in addition to the code which can be run in both command line and GUI format (the latter launched via FM_GUI.m).


This release is version 2.2, which includes a FoMSWG Extension that is based on the code written by Dragan Huterer and produced for the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) FoM Science Working Group (FoMSWG). In this formulation Principal Components (PCs) are used to help determine the sensitivity of future surveys. More details are available in the FoMSWG technical paper, http://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/fomswg/fomswg_technical.pdf .

For a detailed description of all the changes made in this release, please see the Readme.txt in the Fisher4Cast folder.

Tested under Windows, Linux and to a lesser extent, under Mac OS X.