February 13, 2016

Detecting gravitational waves

The LIGO gravitational wave detector is an immensely complex endeavour, a system capable of detecting minute gravitational waves, and of not detecting everything else.

To this end, the researchers relied on every science from astronomy to, well, perhaps not zymurgy, but at least statistics. If you want to know “did we just hear two black holes collide?” it helps to know what it will sound like when two black holes collide right at the very limit of audibility, and how likely you are to hear noises like that just from motorbikes, earthquakes, and Superbowl crowds.  That is, you want a probability model for the background noise and a probability model for the sound of colliding black holes, so you can compute the likelihood ratio between them — how much evidence is in this signal.

One of the originators of some of the methods used by LIGO is Renate Meyer, an Associate Professor in the Stats department. Here’s her comments to the Science Media Centre, and a post on the department website

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »