Parameter Biases Introduced by Approximate Gravitational Waveforms

The production of the most accurate gravitational waveforms from compact binary mergers require Einstein's equations to be solved numerically, a process far too expensive to produce the $\sim$10$^7$ waveforms necessary to estimate the parameters of a measured gravitational wave signal. Instead, parameter estimation depends on approximate or phenomenological waveforms to characterize measured signals. As part of the Ninja collaboration, we study the biases introduced by these methods when estimating the parameters of numerically produced waveforms.