A Fast Method to Predict Distributions of Binary Black Hole Masses Based on Gaussian Process Regression

With more observations from LIGO in the upcoming years, we will be able to construct an observed mass distribution of black holes to compare with binary evolution simulations. This will allow us to investigate the physics of binary evolution such as the effects of common envelope efficiency and wind strength, or the properties of the population such as the initial mass function.However, binary evolution codes become computationally expensive when running large populations of binaries over a multi-dimensional grid of input parameters, and may simulate accurately only for a limited combination of input parameter values. Therefore we developed a fast machine-learning method that utilizes Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Gaussian Process (GP) regression, which together can predict distributions over the entire parameter space based on a limited number of simulated models. Furthermore, Gaussian Process regression naturally provides interpolation errors in addition to interpolation means, which could provide a means of targeting the most uncertain regions of parameter space for running further simulations.We also present a case study on applying this new method to predicting chirp mass distributions for binary black hole systems (BBHs) in Milky-way like galaxies of different metallicities.