A one-stop function for gravitational-wave detection, identification and inference

Abstract

I define here a novel function on a modeled space of gravitational-wave signals, before studying its properties as a statistic for detection, as an objective function for identification, and as an effective likelihood function for inference. The main motivation behind this work is the open data-analysis problem for signals from extreme-mass-ratio inspirals, which is severely hindered by the presence of strong non-local parameter degeneracy in the signal space. I demonstrate the utility of the proposed function for the analysis of such signals, and suggest various possible directions for future research.