Normalizing Flows for Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis: A Gravitational Wave Population Study

11/15/2022
by   David Ruhe, et al.
24

We propose parameterizing the population distribution of the gravitational wave population modeling framework (Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis) with a normalizing flow. We first demonstrate the merit of this method on illustrative experiments and then analyze four parameters of the latest LIGO data release: primary mass, secondary mass, redshift, and effective spin. Our results show that despite the small and notoriously noisy dataset, the posterior predictive distributions (assuming a prior over the parameters of the flow) of the observed gravitational wave population recover structure that agrees with robust previous phenomenological modeling results while being less susceptible to biases introduced by less-flexible distribution models. Therefore, the method forms a promising flexible, reliable replacement for population inference distributions, even when data is highly noisy.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
07/25/2022

Automated discovery of interpretable gravitational-wave population models

We present an automatic approach to discover analytic population models ...
research
08/02/2019

Population Predictive Checks

Bayesian modeling has become a staple for researchers analyzing data. Th...
research
10/26/2020

Hierarchical Inference With Bayesian Neural Networks: An Application to Strong Gravitational Lensing

In the past few years, approximate Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) have ...
research
11/02/2014

Population Empirical Bayes

Bayesian predictive inference analyzes a dataset to make predictions abo...
research
09/22/2020

Hierarchical Bayesian Bootstrap for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation

A major focus of causal inference is the estimation of heterogeneous ave...
research
01/28/2019

Hierarchical network models for structured exchangeable interaction processes

Network data often arises via a series of structured interactions among ...
research
07/27/2021

Individual Survival Curves with Conditional Normalizing Flows

Survival analysis, or time-to-event modelling, is a classical statistica...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset