1210.3578 (Lindley Lentati et al.)

A Hyper-Efficient Method for the Analysis of Pulsar Timing Data    [PDF]

Lindley Lentati, Paul Alexander, Michael P. Hobson, Stephen Taylor, Sreekumar T. Balan

We present a new method for the analysis of pulsar timing data and the estimation of the spectral properties of an isotropic gravitational wave background (GWB). By sampling from the joint probability density of the power spectrum coefficients for the individual pulsars and the GWB signal realisation we can eliminate the most costly aspects of computation normally associated with this type of data analysis. We use a `Guided Hamiltonian Sampler' to efficiently sample from this higher dimensional (~ 400) space, and show by taking this approach we need make no assumptions about the properties of the power spectrum of the GWB, thus providing a much more general approach to the problem of pulsar data analysis. When applied to the IPTA Mock Data Challenge datasets this allows us to make inferences not only on the global properties of the GWB, but also about the individual pulsars in the dataset, whilst also providing speedups of approximately two orders of magnitude.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3578