Iconic image of M87 black hole just got a machine learning makeover

“PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of constructing images from EHT observations.”

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[mir-teiwaz]

They did use observed data.

The model is sampled from the observations - blurring (to reduced detail), then PCA.

MCMC(Markov Chain Monte Carlo) and sampling the posterior distribution is essential to show they didn't "add" anything that wasn't already there.

It's a model of physically observed components (dictionary lookup) that are combined into images that are consistent with the original observations.

How does monte carlo simulation (effectively, building a probability distribution of results for the model) do anything fundamentally different to "AI"? In both cases you make an inference from the model and the inputs. It's not a comparison to a complete observation, because they don't have one.