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Parallel Nested Slice Sampling for Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2025-09-30 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Inferring parameters and testing hypotheses from gravitational wave signals is a computationally intensive task central to modern astrophysics. Nested sampling, a Bayesian inference technique, has become an established standard for this in the field. However, most common implementations lack the ability to fully utilize modern hardware acceleration. In this work, we demonstrate that when nested sampling is reformulated in a natively vectorized form and run on modern GPU hardware, we can perform inference in a fraction of the time of legacy nested sampling implementations whilst preserving the accuracy and robustness of the method. This scalable, GPU-accelerated approach significantly advances nested sampling for future large-scale gravitational-wave analyses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.24949,
  title  = {Parallel Nested Slice Sampling for Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation},
  author = {David Yallup and Metha Prathaban and James Alvey and Will Handley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.24949},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To be submitted to SciPost Physics Proceedings (EuCAIFCon 2025)