Paper ID: 2410.21076

Accelerated Bayesian parameter estimation and model selection for gravitational waves with normalizing flows

Alicja Polanska, Thibeau Wouters, Peter T. H. Pang, Kaze K. W. Wong, Jason D. McEwen

We present an accelerated pipeline, based on high-performance computing techniques and normalizing flows, for joint Bayesian parameter estimation and model selection and demonstrate its efficiency in gravitational wave astrophysics. We integrate the Jim inference toolkit, a normalizing flow-enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler, with the learned harmonic mean estimator. Our Bayesian evidence estimates run on $1$ GPU are consistent with traditional nested sampling techniques run on $16$ CPU cores, while reducing the computation time by factors of $5\times$ and $15\times$ for $4$-dimensional and $11$-dimensional gravitational wave inference problems, respectively. Our code is available in well-tested and thoroughly documented open-source packages, ensuring accessibility and reproducibility for the wider research community.

Submitted: Oct 28, 2024