Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise

Coalescing compact binaries emitting gravitational wave (GW) signals, as recently detected by the Advanced LIGO–Virgo network, constitute a population over the multidimensional space of component masses and spins, redshift, and other parameters. Characterizing this population is a major goal of GW observations and may be approached via parametric models. We demonstrate hierarchical inference for s...