A flexible Gaussian process reconstruction method and the mass function of the coalescing binary black hole systems

Understand

We develop a new method based on Gaussian process to reconstruct the mass distribution of binary black holes (BBHs).

• Instead of prespecifying the formalisms of mass distribution, we introduce a more flexible and nonparametric model with which the distribution can be mainly determined by the observed data.
• We first test our method with simulated data, and find that it can well recover the injected distribution.
• Then we apply this method to analyze the data of BBHs' observations from LIGO-Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 2.