{"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/one-to-many-comparing-single-gravitational","title":"One to many: comparing single gravitational-wave events to astrophysical populations","arxiv_id":"2305.18539","date":"2023-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Matthew Mould","Davide Gerosa","Marco Dall'Amico","Michela Mapelli"],"abstract":"Gravitational-wave observations have revealed sources whose unusual properties challenge our understanding of compact-binary formation. Inferring the formation processes that are best able to reproduce such events may therefore yield key astrophysical insights. A common approach is to count the fraction of synthetic events from a simulated population that are consistent with some real event. Though appealing owing to its simplicity, this approach is flawed because it neglects the full posterior information, depends on an ad-hoc region that defines consistency, and fails for high signal-to-noise detections. We point out that a statistically consistent solution is to compute the posterior odds between two simulated populations, which crucially is a relative measure, and show how to include the effect of observational biases by conditioning on source detectability. Applying the approach to several gravitational-wave events and simulated populations, we assess the degree to which we can conclude model preference not just between distinct formation pathways but also between subpopulations within a given pathway.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18539v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.18539v2.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":"one-to-many-comparing-single-gravitational","repo_url":"https://github.com/mdmould/popodds","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}