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arXiv · 1909.05966

Learning Bayesian posteriors with neural networks for gravitational-wave inference

Alvin J. K. Chua·Michele Vallisneri
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Abstract

We seek to achieve the Holy Grail of Bayesian inference for gravitational-wave astronomy: using deep-learning techniques to instantly produce the posterior $p(θ|D)$ for the source parameters $θ$, given the detector data $D$. To do so, we train a deep neural network to take as input a signal + noise data set (drawn from the astrophysical source-parameter prior and the sampling distribution of detector noise), and to output a parametrized approximation of the corresponding posterior. We rely on a compact representation of the data based on reduced-order modeling, which we generate efficiently using a separate neural-network waveform interpolant [A. J. K. Chua, C. R. Galley & M. Vallisneri, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 211101 (2019)]. Our scheme has broad relevance to gravitational-wave applications such as low-latency parameter estimation and characterizing the science returns of future experiments. Source code and trained networks are available online at https://github.com/vallis/truebayes.

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BibTeXRIS

Alvin J. K. Chua, Michele Vallisneri. 2020-01-29. Learning Bayesian posteriors with neural networks for gravitational-wave inference. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.124.041102

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