Using Swarm Intelligence To Accelerate Pulsar Timing Analysis

Understand

We provide brief notes on a particle swarm-optimisation approach to constraining the properties of a stochastic gravitational-wave background in the first International Pulsar Timing Array data-challenge.

• The technique employs many computational-agents which explore parameter space, remembering their most optimal positions and also sharing this information with all other agents.
• It is this sharing of information which accelerates the convergence of all agents to the global best-fit location in a very short number of iterations.
• Error estimates can also be provided by fitting a multivariate Gaussian to the recorded fitness of all visited points.