Population-level effects due to mismodeling and degeneracy at the single-event level

Identifying population-level correlations among binary parameters is an important goal of gravitational wave astronomy. Such correlations will likely be critical in understanding the formation channels of compact bodies in our Universe. However, from signal detection to single-event parameter estimation to population-level hierarchical inference, there are many factors that could lead to the incorrect identification of correlations that do not exist in the data. We are particularly interested in understanding the circumstances under which mismodeling and degeneracy at the level of single-event parameter estimation can produce false-positive identification of correlation between uncorrelated parameters at the population level. We explore these effects through an illustrative toy model.