Dynamical mass inference of galaxy clusters with neural flows

Abstract: We present an algorithm for inferring the dynamical mass of galaxy clusters directly from their respective phase-space distributions, i.e. the observed line-of-sight velocities and projected distances of galaxies from the cluster centre. Our method employs normalizing flows, a deep neural network capable of learning arbitrary high-dimensional probability distributions, and inherently accounts, to an adequate extent, for the presence of interloper galaxies which are not bounded to a given cluster, the primary contaminant of dynamical mass measurements. We validate and showcase the performance of our neural flow approach to robustly infer the dynamical mass of clusters from a realistic mock cluster catalogue. A key aspect of our novel algorithm is that it yields the probability density function of the mass of a particular cluster, thereby providing a principled way of quantifying uncertainties, in contrast to conventional machine learning approaches. The neural network mass predictions, when applied to a contaminated catalogue with interlopers, have a mean overall logarithmic residual scatter of 0.028 dex, with a log-normal scatter of 0.126 dex, which goes down to 0.089 dex for clusters in the intermediate to high mass range. This is an improvement by nearly a factor of four relative to the classical cluster mass scaling relation with the velocity dispersion, and outperforms recently proposed machine learning approaches. We also apply our neural flow mass estimator to a compilation of galaxy observations of some well-studied clusters with robust dynamical mass estimates, further substantiating the efficacy of our algorithm.