We describe a Bayesian formalism for analyzing individual gravitational-wave events in light of the rest of an observed population. This analysis reveals how the idea of a "population-informed prior"arises naturally from a suitable marginalization of an underlying hierarchical Bayesian model which consistently accounts for selection effects. Our formalism naturally leads to the presence of "leave-one-out"distributions which include subsets of events. This differs from other approximations, also known as empirical Bayes' methods, which effectively double count one or more events. We design a double-reweighting postprocessing strategy that uses only existing data products to reconstruct the resulting population-informed posterior distributions. Although the correction we highlight is an important conceptual point, we find it has a limited impact on the current catalog of gravitational-wave events. Our approach further allows us to study, for the first time in the gravitational-wave literature, correlations between the parameters of individual events and those of the population.

Moore, C., Gerosa, D. (2021). Population-informed priors in gravitational-wave astronomy. PHYSICAL REVIEW D, 104(8) [10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083008].

Population-informed priors in gravitational-wave astronomy

Gerosa D.
2021

Abstract

We describe a Bayesian formalism for analyzing individual gravitational-wave events in light of the rest of an observed population. This analysis reveals how the idea of a "population-informed prior"arises naturally from a suitable marginalization of an underlying hierarchical Bayesian model which consistently accounts for selection effects. Our formalism naturally leads to the presence of "leave-one-out"distributions which include subsets of events. This differs from other approximations, also known as empirical Bayes' methods, which effectively double count one or more events. We design a double-reweighting postprocessing strategy that uses only existing data products to reconstruct the resulting population-informed posterior distributions. Although the correction we highlight is an important conceptual point, we find it has a limited impact on the current catalog of gravitational-wave events. Our approach further allows us to study, for the first time in the gravitational-wave literature, correlations between the parameters of individual events and those of the population.
Articolo in rivista - Articolo scientifico
black holes, gravitational waves
English
5-ott-2021
2021
104
8
A7
none
Moore, C., Gerosa, D. (2021). Population-informed priors in gravitational-wave astronomy. PHYSICAL REVIEW D, 104(8) [10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083008].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/334080
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