Welcome to nessai’s documentation!

Note

This page is still under construction. Some links may not work and some sections are missing. We also welcome contributions to the documentation. For details how to contribute, see: https://github.com/mj-will/nessai

Nessai

nessai (/ˈnɛsi/): Nested Sampling with Artificial Intelligence

nessai is a nested sampling algorithm for Bayesian Inference that incorporates normalising flows. It is designed for applications where the Bayesian likelihood is computationally expensive.

The code is available at: https://github.com/mj-will/nessai.

Contents:

• Installation
• Running the sampler
• Sampler configuration
• Reparameterisations
• Normalising flows configuration
• Parallelisation with nessai
• Gravitational-wave inference
• Further details
• API reference

Examples:

• Simple Gaussian example
• Bilby example

Citing nessai

If you find nessai useful in your work please cite the DOI for this code and our paper:

@software{nessai,
  author       = {Michael J. Williams},
  title        = {nessai: Nested Sampling with Artificial Intelligence},
  month        = feb,
  year         = 2021,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {latest},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.4550693},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4550693}
}

@article{williams2021nested,
  title={Nested Sampling with Normalising Flows for Gravitational-Wave Inference},
  author={Michael J. Williams and John Veitch and Chris Messenger},
  year={2021},
  eprint={2102.11056},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={gr-qc}
}