The stepping-stone sampling algorithm for calculating the evidence of gravitational wave models

Understand

Bayesian statistical inference has become increasingly important for the analysis of observations from the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors.

• To this end, iterative simulation techniques, in particular nested sampling and parallel tempering, have been implemented in the software library LALInference to sample from the posterior distribution of waveform parameters of compact binary coalescence events.
• Nested sampling was mainly developed to calculate the marginal likelihood of a model but can produce posterior samples as a by-product.
• Thermodynamic integration is employed to calculate the evidence using samples generated by parallel tempering but has been found to be computationally demanding.