Parametrizing modified gravity for cosmological surveys

One of the challenges in testing gravity with cosmology is the vast freedom opened when extending General Relativity. For linear perturbations, one solution consists in using the effective field theory of dark energy. Even then, the theory space is described in terms of a handful of free functions of time. This needs to be reduced to a finite number of parameters to be practical for cosmological surveys. We explore in this article how well simple parametrizations, with a small number of parameters, can fit observables computed from complex theories. Imposing the stability of linear perturbations appreciably reduces the theory space we explore. We find that observables are not extremely sensitive to short time-scale variations and that simple, smooth parametrizations are usually sufficient to describe this theory space. Using the Bayesian information criterion, we find that using two parameters for each function (an amplitude and a power-law index) is preferred over complex models for 86% of our theory space.