Reconstruction of missing data using iterative harmonic expansion

In the cosmic microwave background or galaxy density maps, missing fluctuations in masked regions can be reconstructed from fluctuations in the surrounding unmasked regions if the original fluctuations are sufficiently smooth. One reconstruction method involves applying a harmonic expansion iteratively to fluctuations in the unmasked region. In this paper, we discuss how well this reconstruction method can recover the original fluctuations depending on the prior of fluctuations and property of the masked region. The reconstruction method is formulated with an asymptotic expansion in terms of the size of mask for a fixed iteration number. The reconstruction accuracy depends on the mask size, the spectrum of the underlying density fluctuations, the scales of the fluctuations to be reconstructed and the number of iterations. For Gaussian fluctuations with the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum, the reconstruction method provides more accurate restoration than naive methods based on brute-force matrix inversion or the singular value decomposition. We also demonstrate that an isotropic non-Gaussian prior does not change the results but an anisotropic non-Gaussian prior can yield a higher reconstruction accuracy compared to the Gaussian prior case.