Interpretable Analytic Formulae for GWTC-4 Binary Black Hole Population Properties via Symbolic Regression

TL;DR

This paper uses symbolic regression to derive simple, analytic formulas for key properties of the binary black hole population from GWTC-4 data, improving interpretability and computational efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a symbolic regression framework that produces transparent, closed-form expressions for black hole population features, replacing complex models with analytic laws.

Findings

Derived analytic expressions for merger-rate evolution with redshift

Identified robust correlations between mass ratio and effective spin

Revealed distinct functional forms for mass-ratio distributions conditioned on primary mass

Abstract

Recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) analyses have revealed complex structure in the binary black hole (BBH) population, including distinct features in the primary mass spectrum and nontrivial spin-mass correlations. However, the phenomenological models used to capture these features often lack analytic transparency, making it difficult to isolate robust physical laws from modeling artifacts. To address this, symbolic regression is applied to the posterior inference products of the GWTC-4 catalog, discovering compact, closed-form analytic expressions for four key population relationships: (i) the merger-rate evolution with redshift; (ii) the mass-ratio dependence of the effective-spin distribution; (iii) the redshift evolution of the effective-spin distribution; and (iv) the conditional mass-ratio distributions associated with the 10 solar mass and 35 solar mass primary mass peaks. This framework successfully compresses both rigid and highly flexible models into differentiable phenomenological laws, dynamically recovering a consistent low-redshift merger-rate slope without assuming an a priori power-law form. The exact analytic derivatives provided by symbolic regression show that the mass ratio--effective spin and redshift--effective spin correlations are robustly driven by broadening of the posterior widths rather than shifts in the mean. Furthermore, qualitatively distinct functional forms for the mass-ratio distributions conditioned on the 10 solar mass and 35 solar mass primary mass peaks are identified. These closed-form expressions enable exact analytic gradient diagnostics and compact surrogate summaries, particularly for flexible numerical posteriors that are not otherwise available in low-dimensional analytic form. They also facilitate rapid downstream calculations for rate forecasting, formation channel comparison, and stochastic background estimation.