Robust inference of gravitational wave source parameters in the presence of noise transients using normalizing flows

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust machine learning approach using normalizing flows to infer gravitational wave source parameters directly from contaminated data, effectively handling unknown noise transients without prior glitch removal.

Contribution

The study introduces a normalizing flow-based method that reliably infers GW parameters amidst glitches, advancing data analysis robustness in gravitational wave astronomy.

Findings

Normalizing flows can infer GW parameters with contaminated data.

The nature of glitches affects inference accuracy.

The method speeds up localization and data processing.

Abstract

Gravitational wave (GW) detection is of paramount importance in fundamental physics and GW astronomy, yet it presents formidable challenges. One significant challenge is the removal of noise transient artifacts known as glitches, which greatly impact the search and identification of GWs. Recent research has achieved remarkable results in data denoising, often using effective modeling methods to remove glitches. However, for glitches from uncertain or unknown sources, current methods cannot completely eliminate them from the GW signal. In this work, we leverage the inherent robustness of machine learning to obtain reliable posterior parameter distributions directly from GW data contaminated by glitches. Our network model provides reasonable and rapid parameter inference even in the presence of glitches, without needing to remove them. We also investigate various factors affecting the rationality of parameter inference in our normalizing flow network, including glitch and GW parameters. The results demonstrate that the normalizing flow can reasonably infer the source parameters of GWs even with unknown contamination. We find that the nature of the glitch itself is the only factor that can affect the rationality of the inferred results. With improvements to our model, we anticipate accelerating the localization of electromagnetic counterparts and providing priors for more accurate deglitching, thereby speeding up subsequent data processing procedures.