Enhancing dark siren cosmology via Gaussian process reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs
Abstract
We present a novel framework for improving dark siren cosmology by applying a Gaussian process (GP) to the line-of-sight (LOS) reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs. In the standard galaxy catalog method for inferring the Hubble constant H0 from gravitational-wave (GW) dark sirens, missing galaxies are typically assumed to follow a uniform distribution in comoving volume, an assumption that discards galaxy redshift clustering information crucial for cosmological inference. We propose instead to model the LOS galaxy redshift distribution as a non-parametric function drawn from a GP realization, which is fitted to the observed incomplete catalog via a hierarchical Bayesian likelihood that explicitly accounts for the survey selection function. Applied to mock GW and galaxy catalogs extending up to redshift z≤0.4, our method yields H0 constraints that are on average 23% more precise than the standard homogeneous completion when using a 24%-complete galaxy catalog, and 37% more precise for an 8%-complete catalog. The largest improvement, reaching 66%, is obtained in configurations where the GP most effectively reconstructs the redshift over- and under-density features that the homogeneous completion fails to capture.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{tagliazucchi2026enhancing,
title = {{Enhancing dark siren cosmology via Gaussian process reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs}},
author = {Matteo Tagliazucchi and Jonathan Gair and Riccardo Barbieri and Michele Moresco},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.24992},
eprint = {2608.24992},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24992},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Enhancing dark siren cosmology via Gaussian process reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs
AU - Matteo Tagliazucchi
AU - Jonathan Gair
AU - Riccardo Barbieri
AU - Michele Moresco
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.24992
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24992
AB - We present a novel framework for improving dark siren cosmology by applying a Gaussian process (GP) to the line-of-sight (LOS) reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs. In the standard galaxy catalog method for inferring the Hubble constant H_0 from gravitational-wave (GW) dark sirens, missing galaxies are typically assumed to follow a uniform distribution in comoving volume, an assumption that discards galaxy redshift clustering information crucial for cosmological inference. We propose instead to model the LOS galaxy redshift distribution as a non-parametric function drawn from a GP realization, which is fitted to the observed incomplete catalog via a hierarchical Bayesian likelihood that explicitly accounts for the survey selection function. Applied to mock GW and galaxy catalogs extending up to redshift z≤0.4, our method yields H_0 constraints that are on average 23% more precise than the standard homogeneous completion when using a 24%-complete galaxy catalog, and 37% more precise for an 8%-complete catalog. The largest improvement, reaching 66%, is obtained in configurations where the GP most effectively reconstructs the redshift over- and under-density features that the homogeneous completion fails to capture.
ER -