Bayesian nonparametric estimation of correlated gravitational wave detector network noise using matrix-gamma process priors

This paper addresses the important problem of estimating the noise spectral density of next-generation gravitational-wave detectors, such as LISA and the Einstein Telescope (ET), where cross-channel correlations must be accounted for to avoid biased parameter estimation of gravitational-wave signals.

Unlike approaches that estimate test-mass and optical-metrology-system noise separately at the single-link level and then map them to the Time-Delay Interferometry (TDI) channels through known transfer functions, we develop a Bayesian nonparametric method that directly estimates the spectral density matrix of the XYZ channels, thereby accommodating additional sources of uncertainty.

Our approach combines a flexible matrix-gamma process prior on the matrix-valued coefficients of a Bernstein polynomial basis expansion with a blocked multivariate Whittle likelihood.

The prior guarantees Hermitian positive definiteness of the spectral estimate at every frequency.

To avoid reversible-jump methods, we use an adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for posterior sampling.

The proposed framework can also be used to correct misspecified parametric noise models.

Results from a simulation study and simulated correlated-noise data for both LISA and ET demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.