TempoNest performs a Bayesian analysis of pulsar timing data, which allows for the robust determination of the non-linear pulsar timing solution simultaneously with a range of additional stochastic parameters. This includes both red spin noise and dispersion measure variations using either power law descriptions of the noise, or through a model-independent method that parameterizes the power at individual frequencies in the signal. It uses the Bayesian inference tool MultiNest (ascl:1109.006) to explore the joint parameter space, while using Tempo2 (ascl:1210.015) as a means of evaluating the timing model. TempoNest allows for the analysis of additional stochastic signals beyond the white noise described by the TOA error bars that may be present in the data.

PolyChord is a Bayesian inference tool for the simultaneous calculation of evidences and sampling of posterior distributions. It is a variation on John Skilling's Nested Sampling, utilizing Slice Sampling to generate new live points. It performs well on moderately high dimensional (~100s D) posterior distributions, and can cope with arbitrary degeneracies and multimodality.

LensEnt2 is a maximum entropy reconstructor of weak lensing mass maps. The method takes each galaxy shape as an independent estimator of the reduced shear field and incorporates an intrinsic smoothness, determined by Bayesian methods, into the reconstruction. The uncertainties from both the intrinsic distribution of galaxy shapes and galaxy shape estimation are carried through to the final mass reconstruction, and the mass within arbitrarily shaped apertures are calculated with corresponding uncertainties. The input is a galaxy ellipticity catalog with each measured galaxy shape treated as a noisy tracer of the reduced shear field, which is inferred on a fine pixel grid assuming positivity, and smoothness on scales of w arcsec where w is an input parameter. The ICF width w can be chosen by computing the evidence for it.

MADCOW is a set of parallelized programs written in ANSI C and Fortran 77 that perform a maximum likelihood analysis of visibility data from interferometers observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This software has been used to produce power spectra of the CMB with the Very Small Array (VSA) telescope.

We present further development and the first public release of our multimodal nested sampling algorithm, called MultiNest. This Bayesian inference tool calculates the evidence, with an associated error estimate, and produces posterior samples from distributions that may contain multiple modes and pronounced (curving) degeneracies in high dimensions. The developments presented here lead to further substantial improvements in sampling efficiency and robustness, as compared to the original algorithm presented in Feroz & Hobson (2008), which itself significantly outperformed existing MCMC techniques in a wide range of astrophysical inference problems. The accuracy and economy of the MultiNest algorithm is demonstrated by application to two toy problems and to a cosmological inference problem focusing on the extension of the vanilla $Lambda$CDM model to include spatial curvature and a varying equation of state for dark energy. The MultiNest software is fully parallelized using MPI and includes an interface to CosmoMC (ascl:1106.025). It will also be released as part of the SuperBayeS package (ascl:1109.007) for the analysis of supersymmetric theories of particle physics.

CosmoPower develops Bayesian inference pipelines that leverage machine learning to solve inverse problems in science. While the emphasis is on building algorithms to accelerate Bayesian inference in cosmology, the implemented methods allow for their application across a wide range of scientific fields. CosmoPower provides neural network emulators of matter and Cosmic Microwave Background power spectra, which can replace Boltzmann codes such as CAMB (ascl:1102.026) or CLASS (ascl:1106.020) in cosmological inference pipelines, to source the power spectra needed for two-point statistics analyses. This provides orders-of-magnitude acceleration to the inference pipeline and integrates naturally with efficient techniques for sampling very high-dimensional parameter spaces.