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  • Open Access

Enhancing dark siren cosmology via Gaussian process reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs

Matteo Tagliazucchi1,2,*, Jonathan Gair3, Riccardo Barbieri3, and Michele Moresco1,4,2

  • *Contact author: matteo.tagliazucchi2@unibo.it
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 083523 – Published 13 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vmzf-1wxq

Abstract

We present a novel framework for improving dark siren cosmology by applying a Gaussian process (GP) to the line-of-sight (LOS) reconstruction of incomplete galaxy catalogs. In the standard galaxy catalog method for inferring the Hubble constant H0 from gravitational-wave (GW) dark sirens, missing galaxies are typically assumed to follow a uniform distribution in comoving volume, an assumption that discards galaxy redshift clustering information crucial for cosmological inference. We propose instead to model the LOS galaxy redshift distribution as a nonparametric function drawn from a GP realization, which is fitted to the observed incomplete catalog via a hierarchical Bayesian likelihood that explicitly accounts for the survey selection function. Applied to mock GW and galaxy catalogs extending up to redshift z≤0.4, our method yields H0 constraints that are on average 23% more precise than the standard homogeneous completion when using a 24%-complete galaxy catalog, and 37% more precise for an 8%-complete catalog. The largest improvement, reaching 66%, is obtained in configurations where the GP most effectively reconstructs the redshift over- and underdensity features that the homogeneous completion fails to capture.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 083523– Published 13 October, 2026
  • Received 20 August 2026
  • Accepted 29 September 2026
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