1. K-Contact Distance for Noisy Nonhomogeneous Spatial Point Data with application to Repeating Fast Radio Burst sources
- Author
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Cook, A. M., Li, Dayi, Eadie, Gwendolyn M., Stenning, David C., Scholz, Paul, Bingham, Derek, Craiu, Radu, Gaensler, B. M., Masui, Kiyoshi W., Pleunis, Ziggy, Herrera-Martin, Antonio, Joseph, Ronniy C., Pandhi, Ayush, Pearlman, Aaron B., and Prochaska, J. Xavier
- Subjects
Statistics - Applications ,Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics - Abstract
This paper introduces an approach to analyze nonhomogeneous Poisson processes (NHPP) observed with noise, focusing on previously unstudied second-order characteristics of the noisy process. Utilizing a hierarchical Bayesian model with noisy data, we estimate hyperparameters governing a physically motivated NHPP intensity. Simulation studies demonstrate the reliability of this methodology in accurately estimating hyperparameters. Leveraging the posterior distribution, we then infer the probability of detecting a certain number of events within a given radius, the $k$-contact distance. We demonstrate our methodology with an application to observations of fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment's FRB Project (CHIME/FRB). This approach allows us to identify repeating FRB sources by bounding or directly simulating the probability of observing $k$ physically independent sources within some radius in the detection domain, or the $\textit{probability of coincidence}$ ($P_{\text{C}}$). The new methodology improves the repeater detection $P_{\text{C}}$ in 86% of cases when applied to the largest sample of previously classified observations, with a median improvement factor (existing metric over $P_{\text{C}}$ from our methodology) of $\sim$ 3000., Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics. Feedback/comments welcome
- Published
- 2024