Reducing systematic uncertainties in gravitational-wave population analyses by increasing the detection threshold

Abstract

From catalogs of gravitational-wave transients, the population-level properties of their sources and the formation channels of merging compact binaries can be constrained. However, astrophysical conclusions can be biased by misspecification or misestimation of the population likelihood. Despite detection thresholds on the false-alarm rate (FAR) or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the current catalog is likely contaminated by noise transients. Further, computing the population likelihood becomes less accurate as the catalog grows. Current methods to address these challenges often scale poorly with the number of events and potentially become infeasible for future catalogs. Here, we evaluate a simple remedy: increasing the significance threshold for including events in population analyses. To determine the efficacy of this approach, we analyze simulated catalogs of up to 1600 gravitational-wave signals from black-hole mergers using full Bayesian parameter estimation with current detector sensitivities. We show that the growth in statistical uncertainty about the black-hole population, as we analyze fewer events but with higher SNR, depends on the source parameters of interest. When the SNR threshold is raised from 11 to 15---reducing our catalog size by two--thirds---we find that statistical uncertainties on the mass distribution only grow by a few 10% and constraints on the spin distribution are essentially unchanged; meanwhile, uncertainties on the high-redshift cosmic merger rate more than double. Simultaneously, numerical uncertainty in the estimate of the population likelihood more than halves, allowing us to ensure unbiased inference without additional computational expense. Our results demonstrate that focusing on higher-significance events is an effective way to facilitate robust astrophysical inference with growing gravitational-wave catalogs.