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(H)DPGMM: A Hierarchy of Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Models for the inference of the black hole mass function

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arxiv 2109.05960 v1 pith:T5IXQBXP submitted 2021-09-13 astro-ph.IM gr-qc

classification astro-ph.IMgr-qc
keywords blackdpgmmfunctionholemassmodelwithoutbinary
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We introduce (H)DPGMM, a hierarchical Bayesian non-parametric method based on the Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model, designed to infer data-driven population properties of astrophysical objects without being committal to any specific physical model. We investigate the efficacy of our model on simulated datasets and demonstrate its capability to reconstruct correctly a variety of population models without the need of fine-tuning of the algorithm. We apply our method to the problem of inferring the black hole mass function given a set of gravitational wave observations from LIGO and Virgo, and find that the (H)DPGMM infers a binary black hole mass function that is consistent with previous estimates without the requirement of a theoretically motivated parametric model. Although the number of systems observed is still too small for a robust inference, (H)DPGMM confirms the presence of at least two distinct modes in the observed merging black holes mass function, hence suggesting in a model-independent fashion the presence of at least two classes of binary black hole systems.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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  3. Uncovering Hierarchical Sub-Population of Binary Black Holes

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    A flexible six-component fit to 259 LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA black-hole mergers finds a roughly geometric sequence of mass peaks but no aligned-spin signal except in the lowest-mass component.

  4. Nowhere left to hide: revealing realistic gravitational-wave populations in high dimensions and high resolution with PixelPop

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Modeling all significant correlations with the nonparametric model PixelPop recovers the true black-hole merger rate in a simulated 400-event gravitational-wave catalog, while simpler models introduce bias.

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