Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2009-07-15
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
12 pages, presented at GWDAW13, to appear in CQG
Scientific paper
We investigate the Bayesian framework for detection of continuous gravitational waves (GWs) in the context of targeted searches, where the phase evolution of the GW signal is assumed to be known, while the four amplitude parameters are unknown. We show that the orthodox maximum-likelihood statistic (known as F-statistic) can be rediscovered as a Bayes factor with an unphysical prior in amplitude parameter space. We introduce an alternative detection statistic ("B-statistic") using the Bayes factor with a more natural amplitude prior, namely an isotropic probability distribution for the orientation of GW sources. Monte-Carlo simulations of targeted searches show that the resulting Bayesian B-statistic is more powerful in the Neyman-Pearson sense (i.e. has a higher expected detection probability at equal false-alarm probability) than the frequentist F-statistic.
Krishnan Badri
Prix Reinhard
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