Comparison of neural network architectures for feature extraction from binary black hole merger waveforms

TL;DR

This study compares neural network architectures for extracting features from noisy gravitational-wave signals of binary black hole mergers, highlighting the impact of waveform model choice on network performance and applicability to real data.

Contribution

It systematically evaluates convolutional and recurrent neural networks on diverse waveform datasets, revealing the influence of waveform approximant selection on feature extraction effectiveness.

Findings

Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) performs best among tested architectures.

Waveform approximant choice affects neural network training and validation outcomes.

Networks trained on different datasets show varying performance on real gravitational-wave signals.

Abstract

We evaluate several neural-network architectures, both convolutional and recurrent, for gravitational-wave time-series feature extraction by performing point parameter estimation on noisy waveforms from binary-black-hole mergers. We build datasets of 100,000 elements for each of four different waveform models (or approximants) in order to test how approximant choice affects feature extraction. Our choices include \texttt{SEOBNRv4P} and \texttt{IMRPhenomPv3}, which contain only the dominant quadrupole emission mode, alongside \texttt{IMRPhenomPv3HM} and \texttt{NRHybSur3dq8}, which also account for high-order modes. Each dataset element is injected into detector noise corresponding to the third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration. We identify the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) architecture as the overall best performer in terms of training and validation losses and absence of overfitting to data. Comparison of results between datasets shows that the choice of waveform approximant for the creation of a dataset conditions the feature extraction ability of a trained network. Hence, care should be taken when building a dataset for the training of neural networks, as certain approximants may result in better network convergence of evaluation metrics. However, this performance does not necessarily translate to data which is more faithful to numerical relativity simulations. We also apply this network on actual signals from LVK runs, finding that its feature-extracting performance can be effective on real data.