Have you ever thought "I want to use the PHOEBE code to make inferences about a systems parameters, but it is just so slow."? Well, we had the same thought. More importantly, we wanted to use PHOEBE for vague physics reasons, pay homage to Lisa Kudrow, and make an amazing pun all at the same time. Hence we have PHOEBEBuffay - an emulator for the PHOEBE2 modelling code.
The point of an emulator is generally to do something more efficiently. But, we want to make sure that the emulator is giving us results that make sense. Making an emulator for a code like PHOEBE makes addressing this tractable since the cost of a single model isn't insane like you have in full-blown cosmological simulations.
Another interesting point that we want to build into our emulator is the bounds of the physical parameter space. We're going to train our emulator on a parameter space that makes physical sense (more or less). There are situations in which we could propose a parameter vector that results in a binary that experiences Roche Lobe overflow - meaning that PHOEBE would produce nonsense results. We want to make sure that the emulator doesn't return us something that it thinks is good, but is actually out of bounds.
Nora Eisner Cole Johnston Valentina Tardugno David Hogg