- Accepted Paper
Multivariate Bayesian P-spline estimation of spectral density matrices, with application to LISA TDI noise
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 11 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/76kf-nqbv
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 11 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/76kf-nqbv
We present a Bayesian P-spline method for estimating the frequency-dependent cross-spectral density matrix of stationary multivariate time series. The inverse spectral matrix is parametrised through its frequency-varying Cholesky decomposition, which guarantees Hermitian positive definiteness at every frequency. Each real log-diagonal entry and each real and imaginary off-diagonal entry is given an independent penalised B-spline prior that controls smoothness. Inference uses a blocked, coarse-grained Whittle likelihood with safe-Bayes tempering to stabilise posterior calibration, sampled by the No-U-Turn Sampler from a variational initialisation. On synthetic VAR(2) benchmarks with known ground truth, the method recovers both diagonal and cross-spectral structure, attains near-nominal credible-interval coverage, and achieves a relative integrated squared (Frobenius) error (RISE) that decreases with sample size. We then apply the method to simulated LISA time-delay interferometry (TDI) data in two noise configurations. In the idealised symmetric case, the full multivariate model and a reduced model that assumes a diagonal AET noise covariance agree to within ~10^-3 in RISE. Under realistic noise that is asymmetric across the six Movable Optical Sub-Assemblies (MOSAs), the aet-diagonal assumption fails by more than an order of magnitude in RISE (~3.3 × 10^-2 versus ~10^-3), whereas the full multivariate model recovers the cross-spectral structure.
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