Towards Rapid Parameter Estimation on Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries using Interpolated Waveforms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that interpolated waveforms can be used for rapid and accurate parameter estimation of gravitational waves from compact binaries, reducing computational costs significantly.

Contribution

It introduces a method using interpolated waveforms based on singular value decomposition to efficiently estimate parameters without significant accuracy loss.

Findings

Interpolated waveforms recover posterior distributions with negligible error.

The method reduces computational cost of parameter estimation.

Potential to enhance efficiency of gravitational wave data analysis.

Abstract

Accurate parameter estimation of gravitational waves from coalescing compact binary sources is a key requirement for gravitational-wave astronomy. Evaluating the posterior probability density function of the binary's parameters (component masses, sky location, distance, etc.) requires computing millions of waveforms. The computational expense of parameter estimation is dominated by waveform generation and scales linearly with the waveform computational cost. Previous work showed that gravitational waveforms from non-spinning compact binary sources are amenable to a truncated singular value decomposition, which allows them to be reconstructed via interpolation at fixed computational cost. However, the accuracy requirement for parameter estimation is typically higher than for searches, so it is crucial to ascertain that interpolation does not lead to significant errors. Here we provide a proof of principle to show that interpolated waveforms can be used to recover posterior probability density functions with negligible loss in accuracy with respect to non-interpolated waveforms. This technique has the potential to significantly increase the efficiency of parameter estimation.