Marginalizing the likelihood function for modeled gravitational wave searches

Understand

Matched filtering is a commonly used technique in gravitational wave searches for signals from compact binary systems and from rapidly rotating neutron stars.

• A common issue in these searches is dealing with four extrinsic parameters which do not affect the phase evolution of the system: the overall amplitude, initial phase, and two angles determining the overall orientation of the system.
• The F-statistic maximizes the likelihood function analytically over these parameters, while the B-statistic marginalizes over them.
• The B-statistic, while potentially more powerful and capable of incorporating astrophysical priors, is not as widely used because of the computational difficulty of performing the marginalization.