Searching for Gravitational Wave Bursts via Bayesian Nonparametric Data Analysis with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Abstract

Gravitational wave burst is a catch-all category for signals whose durations are shorter than the observation period. We apply a method new to gravitational wave data analysis --- Bayesian non-parameterics --- to the problem of gravitational wave detection, with an emphasis on pulsar timing array observations. In Bayesian non-parametrics, constraints are set on the function space that may be reasonably thought to characterize the range of gravitational-wave signals. This differs from the approaches currently employed or proposed, which focus on introducing parametric signal models or looking for excess power as evidence of the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Our Bayesian nonparametrics analysis method addresses two issues: (1) investigate if a gravitational wave burst is present in the data; (2) infer the sky location of the source and the duration of the burst. Compared with the popular method proposed by Finn \& Lommen, our method improves in two aspects: (1) we can estimate the burst duration by adding the prior that the gravitational wave signals are smooth, while Finn \& Lommen ignored this important point; (2) we perform a full Bayesian analysis by marginalizing over all possible parameters and provide robust inference on the presence of gravitational waves, while Finn \& Lommen chose to optimize over parameters, which would increase false alarm risk and also underestimate the parameter uncertainties.

30 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Physical Review D. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1004.3499 by other authors

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Time-domain Implementation of the Optimal Cross-Correlation Statistic for Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background Searches in Pulsar Timing Data
• Detection and localization of single-source gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Detecting nanohertz gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Bayesian search for gravitational wave bursts in pulsar timing array data
• Data Analysis of Massive Gravitational Waves from Gamma Ray Bursts
• Searching for A Generic Gravitational Wave Background via Bayesian Nonparametric Analysis with Pulsar Timing Arrays