CoMaLit. V. Mass forecasting with proxies

We need them to trace the formation and evolution of cosmic structure but we can get direct measurements only for a minority. This lack can be circumvented with a proxy and a scaling relation.

The twofold goal of estimating the unbiased relation and finding the right proxy value to plug in can be hampered by systematics, selection effects, Eddington/Malmquist biases and time evolution. We present a Bayesian hierarchical method that deals with these issues. Masses to be predicted are treated as missing data in the regression and are estimated together with the scaling parameters.