A framework for assessing the performance of pulsar search pipelines
Abstract
In this paper, we present a framework for assessing the effect of non-stationary Gaussian noise and radio frequency interference (RFI) on the signal to noise ratio, the
number of false positives detected per true positive and the sensitivity of standard
pulsar search pipelines. The results highlight the necessity to develop algorithms that
are able to identify and remove non-stationary variations from the data before RFI excision and searching is performed in order to limit false positive detections. The results
also show that the spectrum whitening algorithms currently employed, severely affect
the effciency of pulsar search pipelines by reducing their sensitivity to long period
pulsars.