This article discusses the covariance matrix in relation to total likelihoods across frequency bins, emphasizing a signal-only analysis. By computing the covariance, we find that the peaks are statistically independent, enabling the total likelihood to be expressed as the product of individual likelihoods.
Authors:
(1) Dorian W. P. Amaral, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University and These authors contributed approximately equally to this work;
(2) Mudit Jain, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, King’s College London and These authors contributed approximately equally to this work;
(3) Mustafa A. Amin, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University;
(4) Christopher Tunnell, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University.
To treat the total likelihood as the product of the individual likelihoods in each frequency bin, we must check that the covariance matrix is diagonal.
We will consider a signal-only analysis, discarding the noise, since the noise merely adds to the power and is uncorrelated between different frequency bins. We may write the values of the three peaks as
We wish to compute the quantity
We can do this using the expression for the raw moments,
where, for us, σ = 1/ √ 2. Aside from this, we need to know that
We then get that
Crucially, we get that the covariance between peaks is 0, allowing us to treat them as statistically independent and hence permitting us to express the total likelihood as the product of the individual likelihoods.