Related papers: Bayesian versus frequentist upper limits
In almost every scientific field, an experiment involves collecting data and then analysing it. The analysis stage will often consist in trying to extract some physical parameter and estimating its uncertainty; this is known as Parameter…
Data analysis is the application of probability and statistics to draw inference from observation. Is a signal present or absent? Is the source an inspiraling binary system or a supernova? At what point in the sky is the radiation incident…
In many hypothesis testing applications, we have mixed priors, with well-motivated informative priors for some parameters but not for others. The Bayesian methodology uses the Bayes factor and is helpful for the informative priors, as it…
Like light, gravitational waves are gravitationally lensed by intervening massive astrophysical objects, such as galaxies, clusters, black holes, and stars, resulting in a variety of potentially observable gravitational-wave lensing…
Searches for gravitational-wave bursts have often focused on the loudest event(s) in searching for detections and in determining upper limits on astrophysical populations. Typical upper limits have been reported on event rates and event…
The intuitive reasoning of physicists in conditions of uncertainty is closer to the Bayesian approach than to the frequentist ideas taught at University and which are considered the reference framework for handling statistical problems. The…
Bayes Factors, the Bayesian tool for hypothesis testing, are receiving increasing attention in the literature. Compared to their frequentist rivals ($p$-values or test statistics), Bayes Factors have the conceptual advantage of providing…
A common concern with Bayesian methodology in scientific contexts is that inferences can be heavily influenced by subjective biases. As presented here, there are two types of bias for some quantity of interest: bias against and bias in…
The models currently used in the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) either do not consider a relative motion between the center-of-mass of the source and the observer, or usually only consider its effect on the frequencies of GWs.…
Between the two dominant schools of thought in statistics, namely, Bayesian and classical/frequentist, a main difference is that the former is grounded in the mathematically rigorous theory of probability while the latter is not. In this…
The analysis of gravitational wave data involves many model selection problems. The most important example is the detection problem of selecting between the data being consistent with instrument noise alone, or instrument noise and a…
The two statistical methods, namely the frequentist and the Bayesian methods, are both commonly used for probabilistic inference in many scientific situations. However, it is not straightforward to interpret the result of one approach in…
We describe a general approach to detection of transient gravitational-wave signals in the presence of non-Gaussian background noise. We prove that under quite general conditions, the ratio of the likelihood of observed data to contain a…
In statistical practice, whether a Bayesian or frequentist approach is used in inference depends not only on the availability of prior information but also on the attitude taken toward partial prior information, with frequentists tending to…
There is a broad class of astrophysical sources that produce detectable, transient, gravitational waves. Some searches for transient gravitational waves are tailored to known features of these sources. Other searches make few assumptions…
We propose a construction of frequentist confidence intervals that is effective near unphysical regions and unifies the treatment of two-sided and upper limit intervals. It is rigorous, has coverage, is computationally simple and avoids the…
In counting experiments, one can set an upper limit on the rate of a Poisson process based on a count of the number of events observed due to the process. In some experiments, one makes several counts of the number of events, using…
We consider the issue of reporting the result of search experiment in the most unbiased and efficient way, i.e. in a way which allows an easy interpretation and combination of results and which do not depend on whether the experimenters…
By listening to gravity in the low frequency band, between 0.1 mHz and 1 Hz, the future space-based gravitational-wave observatory LISA will be able to detect tens of thousands of astrophysical sources from cosmic dawn to the present. The…
With the advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors taking observations the detection of gravitational waves is expected within the next few years. Extracting astrophysical information from gravitational wave detections is a well-posed problem and…