nature and any local approximation will be inadequate in explaining away the errors. Moreover we suggest that the variance/covariance of the parameters is not a proper measure of the errors in this case. We therefore propose a new criterion by which the MLE should be judged.

The paper is organized as follows. In section \[waveform\] we briefly describe the gravitational wave signal waveform and the parameters on which it depends, namely, the amplitude, the time of arrival, the phase at arrival and the ‘chirp times’, which characterizes the time for the binary to evolve from some fiducial time to the actual merger. These parameters are found to be very convenient when we carry out Monte Carlo simulations. It turns out that the covariance matrix is independent of these parameters and hence it is sufficient to carry out the simulations only for a particular set of parameters. Further in this section we also describe the characterstics of the noise that we assume will be present in the detector and briefly review the matched filtering technique. In section \[MCres\] we present the results of the Monte Carlo simulations for the Newtonian case. We carry out transformations of the parameter space which bring 