This IMPRS course on “Making sense of data: introduction to statistics for gravitational wave astronomy” was a repeat of the statistics courses in 2021 and 2023 with some modifications. There have been four weeks of lectures from November 12 to December 8, 2025. The lectures have been given by Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gair, group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department at the AEI, and Dr. Franciso Duque, Postdoc at the same department.

Lectures took place from 11am to 12pm on Monday and Wednesday of each week and from 10am to 11am on Thursday and Friday. Attention, the first day of the course is a Wednesday and the last day is a Monday.

The lecture notes and lecture recordings can be found under “Course Materials” on the pages of the individual lectures.

Synopsis: Measurements of the properties of gravitational wave sources are imperfect due to the presence of noise in the gravitational wave interferometers used to detect them. Extracting useful scientific information from these observations therefore requires careful statistical analysis of the data in order to understand the significance of the observed events, the level of uncertainty in the parameter estimates and the implications of the observations for the population from which the sources are drawn. This lecture course will give an overview of some key statistical ideas and techniques that are essential for interpreting current and future gravitational wave observations.

Provisional plan for lecture topics

Part 1 (lectures 1 to 6): Frequentist statistics and stochastic processes

Part 2 (lectures 7 to 14): Bayesian statistics

Part 3 (lectures 15 to 16): Introduction to machine learning