  The detection of gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes raises
questions regarding the origin of binaries. There are several models in the
literature involving binary evolution in both the field and clusters. We
compare the predictions of these models with observations and establish the
reliability of this comparison. We use the likelihood calculation to compare
the models in the space spanned by the observed chirp mass and the luminosity
distance of the source. We rank the models by their ability to explain all
current gravitational wave detections. It is shown that the most probable
models correspond to binary evolution with low metallicity. Several variants of
such evolution have similar likelihoods. The globular cluster model, considered
here, is disfavoured. We present the usefulness of the method in distinguishing
between models when new observations become available. We calculate the number
of observations required to distinguish between each pair of models. We find
that the number varies from ten to several thousand for some pairs of models,
yet almost two-thirds of pairs are distinguishable with at most 100
observations.
