Enhancing the sensitivity of transient gravitational wave searches with Gaussian Mixture Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a supervised machine learning method using Gaussian mixture models to improve the sensitivity of transient gravitational wave searches by better distinguishing genuine signals from noise and glitches.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel application of Gaussian mixture models to model trigger attribute space, significantly enhancing detection sensitivity and reducing false positives in gravitational wave searches.

Findings

Detection probability increased by a factor of 10.

Significant suppression of glitches and background noise.

Enhanced statistical significance for GW150914.

Abstract

Identifying the presence of a gravitational wave transient buried in non-stationary, non-Gaussian noise which can often contain spurious noise transients (glitches) is a very challenging task. For a given data set, transient gravitational wave searches produce a corresponding list of triggers that indicate the possible presence of a gravitational wave signal. These triggers are often the result of glitches mimicking gravitational wave signal characteristics. To distinguish glitches from genuine gravitational wave signals, search algorithms estimate a range of trigger attributes, with thresholds applied to these trigger properties to separate signal from noise. Here, we present the use of Gaussian mixture models, a supervised machine learning approach, as a means of modelling the multi-dimensional trigger attribute space. We demonstrate this approach by applying it to triggers from the coherent Waveburst search for generic bursts in LIGO O1 data. By building Gaussian mixture models for the signal and background noise attribute spaces, we show that we can significantly improve the sensitivity of the coherent Waveburst search and strongly suppress the impact of glitches and background noise, without the use of multiple search bins as employed by the original O1 search. We show that the detection probability is enhanced by a factor of 10, leading enhanced statistical significance for gravitational wave signals such as GW150914.