Gravitational wave detection without boot straps: a Bayesian approach

Understand

In order to separate astrophysical gravitational-wave signals from instrumental noise, which often contains transient non-Gaussian artifacts, astronomers have traditionally relied on bootstrap methods such as time slides.

• Bootstrap methods sample with replacement, comparing single-observatory data to construct a background distribution, which is used to assign a false-alarm probability to candidate signals.
• While bootstrap methods have played an important role establishing the first gravitational-wave detections, there are limitations.
• First, as the number of detections increases, it makes increasingly less sense to treat single-observatory data as bootstrap-estimated noise, when we know that the data are filled with astrophysical signals, some resolved, some unresolved.