English

Pulsar Timing Arrays require hierarchical models

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2024-11-28 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Pulsar Timing Array projects have found evidence of a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWB) using data from an ensemble of pulsars. In the literature, minimal assumptions are made about the signal and noise processes that affect data from these pulsars, such as pulsar spin noise. These assumptions are encoded as uninformative priors in Bayesian searches, though Frequentist approaches make similar assumptions. Uninformative priors are not suitable for (noise) properties of pulsars in an ensemble, and they bias estimates of model parameters such as gravitational-wave signal parameters. Both Frequentist and Bayesian searches are affected. In this letter, more appropriate priors are proposed in the language of Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling, where the properties of the ensemble of pulsars are jointly described with the properties of the individual components of the ensemble. Results by Pulsar Timing Array projects should be re-evaluated using Hierarchical Models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.05081,
  title  = {Pulsar Timing Arrays require hierarchical models},
  author = {Rutger van Haasteren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.05081},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

16 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:57:33.552Z