Genetic algorithms and the analysis of SnIa data

Abstract

The Genetic Algorithm is a heuristic that can be used to produce model independent solutions to an optimization problem, thus making it ideal for use in cosmology and more specifically in the analysis of type Ia supernovae data. In this work we use the Genetic Algorithms (GA) in order to derive a null test on the spatially flat cosmological constant model ΛCDM. This is done in two steps: first, we apply the GA to the Constitution SNIa data in order to acquire a model independent reconstruction of the expansion history of the Universe H(z) and second, we use the reconstructed H(z) in conjunction with the Om statistic, which is constant only for the ΛCDM model, to derive our constraints. We find that while ΛCDM is consistent with the data at the 2σ level, some deviations from ΛCDM model at low redshifts can be accommodated.