Galactic Double Neutron Star total masses and Gaussian mixture model selection

Understand

Huang et al.

• [arXiv:1804.03101] have analysed the population of 15 known galactic Double Neutron Stars (DNSs) regarding the total masses of these systems.
• They suggest the existence of two sub-populations, and report likelihood-based preference for a two-component Gaussian mixture model over a single Gaussian distribution.
• This note offers a cautionary perspective on model selection for this data set: Especially for such a small sample size, a pure likelihood ratio test can encourage overfitting.