  Resolvable Supermassive Black Hole Binaries are promising sources for Pulsar
Timing Array based gravitational wave searches. Search algorithms for such
targets must contend with the large number of so-called pulsar phase parameters
in the joint log-likelihood function of the data. We compare the localization
accuracy for two approaches: Maximization over the pulsar phase parameters
(MaxPhase) against marginalization over them (AvPhase). Using simulated data
from a pulsar timing array with 17 pulsars, we find that for weak and
moderately strong signals, AvPhase outperforms MaxPhase significantly, while
they perform comparably for strong signals.
