Isolate the effect of galaxy-catalog incompleteness on host identification

Isolate the effect of galaxy-catalog incompleteness on the host-identification performance of the hierarchical gravitational-wave–galaxy inference framework, separating it from differences in candidate-galaxy sparsity within the gravitational-wave localization volume.

Background

The supplemental results compare complete- and incomplete-catalog simulations using true-host ranking and posterior-concentration diagnostics. However, the authors caution that the two cases probe different regimes because catalog incompleteness changes the number and distribution of candidate galaxies within the localization region.

Consequently, the separate contribution of incompleteness to host-identification performance remains unresolved. A controlled analysis isolating this effect would clarify how missing galaxies, rather than candidate sparsity more generally, alter ranking accuracy and posterior concentration.

References

Isolating the effect of catalog incompleteness itself is left to future work.

— Gravitational-wave dark sirens as astrophysical probes: inferring galaxy-merger relations and identifying individual hosts  (2609.38110 - Agapito et al., 29 Sep 2026) in Supplemental Material, Section “Validation and characterization of host inference,” paragraph preceding Table S2