May 5 – 8, 2026
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone

The power of Normalizing Flows for Bayesian inference

May 6, 2026, 10:00 AM
20m
40/S2-A01 - Salle Anderson (CERN)

40/S2-A01 - Salle Anderson

CERN

95
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Talk AI for Data Analysis AI for data analysis

Speaker

Dr Eleonora Villa (INAF - IASF Mi)

Description

Pulsar Timing Array data analysis faces severe computational challenges as parameter spaces scale with the number of pulsars. I present two Normalizing Flows (NFs) based strategies to accelerate and improve Bayesian inference for stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). First, integrating NFs into the importance nested sampling framework i-nessai yields speedups of one to three orders of magnitude over standard methods, with robust posteriors and reliable evidence estimates. Second, a dual NFs architecture implementing parameter decorrelation via orthogonal projection disentangles pulsar noise from hyperprior parameters in hierarchical Bayesian modeling, enhancing noise constraining power even in the presence of a SGWB signal.

Author

Dr Eleonora Villa (INAF - IASF Mi)

Presentation materials