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arXiv · 2305.00071

A Unified $p_\mathrm{astro}$ for Gravitational Waves: Consistently Combining Information from Multiple Search Pipelines

Sharan Banagiri·Christopher P. L. Berry·Gareth S. Cabourn Davies·Leo Tsukada·Zoheyr Doctor
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Abstract

Recent gravitational-wave transient catalogs have used \pastro{}, the probability that a gravitational-wave candidate is astrophysical, to select interesting candidates for further analysis. Unlike false alarm rates, which exclusively capture the statistics of the instrumental noise triggers, \pastro{} incorporates the rate at which triggers are generated by both astrophysical signals and instrumental noise in estimating the probability that a candidate is astrophysical. Multiple search pipelines can independently calculate \pastro{}, each employing a specific data reduction. While the range of \pastro{} results can help indicate the range of uncertainties in its calculation, it complicates interpretation and subsequent analyses. We develop a statistical formalism to calculate a \emph{unified} \pastro{} for gravitational-wave candidates, consistently accounting for triggers from all pipelines, thereby incorporating extra information about a signal that is not available with any one single pipeline. We demonstrate the properties of this method using a toy model and by application to the publicly available list of gravitational-wave candidates from the first half of the third LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run. Adopting a unified \pastro{} for future catalogs would provide a simple and easy-to-interpret selection criterion that incorporates a more complete understanding of the strengths of the different search pipelines

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Sharan Banagiri, Christopher P. L. Berry, Gareth S. Cabourn Davies, Leo Tsukada, Zoheyr Doctor. 2023-04-28. A Unified $p_\mathrm{astro}$ for Gravitational Waves: Consistently Combining Information from Multiple Search Pipelines. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.108.083043

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