Blind QSO reconstruction challenge: Exploring methods to reconstruct the Lyα emission line of QSOs

Reconstructing the intrinsic Lyα line flux from high-z QSOs can place constraints on the neutral hydrogen content of the intergalactic medium during reionisation. There are now ≳10 different Lyα reconstruction pipelines using different methodologies to predict the Lyα line flux from correlations with the spectral information redward of Lyα. However, there have been few attempts to directly compare the performance of these pipelines. Therefore, we devised a blind QSO challenge to compare these reconstruction pipelines on a uniform set of objects. Each author was provided de-identified, observed rest-frame QSO spectra with spectral information only redward of 1260Å rest-frame to ensure unbiased reconstruction. We constructed two samples of 30 QSOs, from X-Shooter and SDSS both spanning 3.5更多