Normalizing Flows for Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis: A Gravitational Wave Population Study. (arXiv:2211.09008v1 [astro-ph.IM])

We propose parameterizing the population distribution of the gravitational
wave population modeling framework (Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis) with a
normalizing flow. We first demonstrate the merit of this method on illustrative
experiments and then analyze four parameters of the latest LIGO data release:
primary mass, secondary mass, redshift, and effective spin. Our results show
that despite the small and notoriously noisy dataset, the posterior predictive
distributions (assuming a prior over the parameters of the flow) of the
observed gravitational wave population …

analysis arxiv astro bayesian hierarchical population study