Recovering the non-linear density field from the galaxy distribution with a Poisson-lognormal filter

We present a general expression for a lognormal filter given an arbitrary non-linear galaxy bias. We derive this filter as the maximum a posteriori solution assuming a lognormal prior distribution for the matter field with a given mean field and modelling the observed galaxy distribution by a Poissonian process. We have performed a three-dimensional implementation of this filter with a very efficient Newton-Krylov inversion scheme. Furthermore, we have tested it with a dark matter N-body simulation assuming a unit galaxy bias relation and compared the results with previous density field estimators like the inverse weighting scheme and Wiener filtering. Our results show good agreement with the underlying dark matter field for overdensities even above delta similar to 1000 which exceeds by one order of magnitude the regime in which the lognormal is expected to be valid. The reason is that for our filter the lognormal assumption enters as a prior distribution function, but the maximum a posteriori solution is also conditioned on the data. We find that the lognormal filter is superior to the previous filtering schemes in terms of higher correlation coefficients and smaller Euclidean distances to the underlying matter field. We also show how it is able to recover the positive tail of the matter overdensity field distribution for a unit bias relation down to scales of about greater than or similar to 2 Mpc h-1.