Welcome to nessai’s documentation!

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}
}