{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/deep-learning-and-bayesian-inference-of","title":"Deep learning and Bayesian inference of gravitational-wave populations: Hierarchical black-hole mergers","arxiv_id":"2203.03651","date":"2022-03-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Matthew Mould","Davide Gerosa","Stephen R. Taylor"],"abstract":"The catalog of gravitational-wave events is growing, and so are our hopes of constraining the underlying astrophysics of stellar-mass black-hole mergers by inferring the distributions of, e.g., masses and spins. While conventional analyses parametrize this population with simple phenomenological models, we propose an emulation-based approach that can compare astrophysical simulations against gravitational-wave data. We combine state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques with hierarchical Bayesian inference and exploit our approach to constrain the properties of repeated black-hole mergers from the gravitational-wave events in the most recent LIGO/Virgo catalog. Deep neural networks allow us to (i) construct a flexible single-channel population model that accurately emulates simple parametrized numerical simulations of hierarchical mergers, (ii) estimate selection effects, and (iii) recover the branching ratios of repeated-merger generations. Among our results, we find the following: The distribution of host-environment escape speeds favors values less than $100~\\mathrm{km\\,s^{-1}}$ but is relatively flat, with around $37\\%$ of first-generation mergers retained in their host environments; first-generation black holes are born with a maximum mass that is compatible with current estimates from pair-instability supernovae; there is multimodal substructure in both the mass and spin distributions, which, in our model, can be explained by repeated mergers; and binaries with a higher-generation component make up at least $14\\%$ of the underlying population. Though these results are inferred through emulation of a simplified model, the deep-learning pipeline we present is readily applicable to realistic astrophysical simulations","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03651v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03651v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"deep-learning-and-bayesian-inference-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/mdmould/qluster","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}