Mitigating Systematic Errors in Parameter Estimation of Binary Black Hole Mergers in O1-O3 LIGO-Virgo Data

Abstract

Systematic errors in the parameter estimation (PE) of gravitational wave (GW) mergers can arise from various sources, including waveform systematics, noise mischaracterization, data analysis artifacts, and other unknown factors. In this study, we analyze selected events from the first three observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration. We choose events that have been flagged in various studies as potentially affected by systematic errors. Here, we reanalyze these events using a couple of parametric models developed in previous work that incorporate uncertainties in both the phase and amplitude of the GW waveform. In this data-driven approach, we apply sufficiently broad priors on the uncertainty parameters to account for potential systematic errors. Our findings show that the proposed method effectively reduces systematic errors, even those arising from data artifacts, such as glitches occurring near a signal and the deglitching process in GW frame files. Similarly, inconsistent results from different waveform models become much more consistent in our framework. One noteworthy event we examine is GW191109\_010717, which is particularly interesting due to its anti-aligned spin properties. We report that, within our framework, the event still exhibits anti-aligned spin characteristics, but the inference results become consistent across raw and deglitched frame files, as well as across the waveform models used for this event (IMRPhenomXPHM, IMRPhenomXO4a, and NRSur7dq4). A similar trend is observed for the event GW200129\_065458, which previously yielded a high, but inconsistent precession parameter among different waveform models. In contrast, we observe a non-zero and consistent value of $\chi_{p}=0.60^{+0.31}_{-0.33}, 0.58^{+0.30}_{-0.29}$ and $0.56^{+0.31}_{-0.28}$ for the IMRPhenomXPHM, IMRPhenomXO4a, and NRSur7dq4 waveform models, respectively.