Concordance and Discordance in Cosmology
  The success of present and future cosmological studies is tied to the ability
to detect discrepancies in complex data sets within the framework of a
cosmological model. Tensions caused by the presence of unknown systematic
effects need to be isolated and corrected to increase the overall accuracy of
parameter constraints, while discrepancies due to new physical phenomena need
to be promptly identified. We develop a full set of estimators of internal and
mutual agreement and disagreement, whose strengths complement each other. These
allow to take into account the effect of prior information and compute the
statistical significance of both tensions and confirmatory biases. We apply
them to a wide range of state of the art cosmological probes and show that
these estimators can be easily used, regardless of model and data complexity.
We derive a series of results that show that discrepancies indeed arise within
the standard LCDM model. Several of them exceed the probability threshold of
95% and deserve a dedicated effort to understand their origin.
