This IMPRS course on “Making sense of data: introduction to statistics for gravitational wave astronomy” is a repeat of the statistics courses in 2019 and 2021 with some modifications. There will be four weeks of lectures from November 13 to December 15, 2023. The lectures will be given by Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gair, group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department at the AEI.

Lectures will take place from 11am to 12pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of each week, with the exceptions of December 6 and 7 – on these two days, there will be 4 lectures given on “black-hole thermodynamics” by Éric Gourgoulhon (note: these are completely independent of this course on data analysis).

Lectures should be attended in person in room 0.01 at the AEI Potsdam. External participants can join via this Zoom link.

When/if available, the lecture notes and lecture recordings can be found under “Course Materials” on the pages of the individual lectures.

Synopsis: Measurements of the properties of gravitational wave sources are imperfect due to the presence of noise in the gravitational wave interferometers used to detect them. Extracting useful scientific information from these observations therefore requires careful statistical analysis of the data in order to understand the significance of the observed events, the level of uncertainty in the parameter estimates and the implications of the observations for the population from which the sources are drawn. This lecture course will give an overview of some key statistical ideas and techniques that are essential for interpreting current and future gravitational wave observations.

Provisional plan for lecture topics

Part 1 (lectures 1 to 6): Frequentist statistics and stochastic processes

Part 2 (lectures 7 to 12): Bayesian statistics

Part 3 (lectures 13 to 16): Introduction to machine learning