Utilizing Gaussian mixture models in all-sky searches for short-duration gravitational wave bursts

TL;DR

This paper enhances all-sky short-duration gravitational wave burst searches by applying Gaussian mixture models as a postprocessing step, improving sensitivity and significance in detecting signals from various astrophysical sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Gaussian mixture model approach to improve the detection and significance of gravitational wave bursts in the coherent WaveBurst search.

Findings

Improved sensitivity to generic burst signals.

Better significance for binary black hole signals.

No new significant gravitational wave events detected.

Abstract

Coherent WaveBurst is a generic, multidetector gravitational wave burst search based on the excess power approach. The coherent WaveBurst algorithm currently employed in the all-sky short-duration gravitational wave burst search uses a conditional approach on selected attributes in the multidimensional event attribute space to distinguish between noisy events from that of astrophysical origin. We have been developing a supervised machine learning approach based on the Gaussian mixture modeling to model the attribute space for signals as well as noise events to enhance the probability of burst detection [Gayathri et al.Phys. Rev. D 102, 104023 (2020)]. We further extend the GMM approach to the all-sky short-duration coherent WaveBurst search as a postprocessing step on events from the first half of the third observing run (O3a). We show an improvement in sensitivity to generic gravitational wave burst signal morphologies as well as the astrophysical source such as core-collapse supernova models due to the application of our Gaussian mixture model approach to coherent WaveBurst triggers. The Gaussian mixture model method recovers the gravitational wave signals from massive compact binary coalescences identified by coherent WaveBurst targeted for binary black holes in GWTC-2, with better significance than the all-sky coherent WaveBurst search. No additional significant gravitational wave bursts are observed.