Coalescing compact binaries emitting gravitational wave (GW) signals, as recently detected by the Advanced LIGO-Virgo network, constitute a population over the multi-dimensional space of component masses and spins, redshift, and other parameters. Characterizing this population is a major goal of GW observations and may be approached via parametric models. We demonstrate hierarchical inference for such models with a method that accounts for uncertainties in each binary merger's individual parameters, for mass-dependent selection effects, and also for the presence of a second population of candidate events caused by detector noise. Thus, the method is robust to potential biases from a contaminated sample and allows us to extract information from events that have a relatively small probability of astrophysical origin.
@article{arxiv.1809.03815,
title = {Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise},
author = {Sebastian M. Gaebel and John Veitch and Thomas Dent and Will M. Farr},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.03815},
year = {2019}
}