From One to Many: A Deep Learning Coincident Gravitational-Wave Search
This work addresses the computational cost and signal complexity challenges in gravitational-wave detection for astrophysics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing machine learning approaches without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers using neural networks, achieving 91.5% sensitivity for a single detector and 83.9% for two detectors compared to matched filtering, but found that simple two-detector networks did not improve sensitivity over individual detector analysis.
Gravitational waves from the coalescence of compact-binary sources are now routinely observed by Earth bound detectors. The most sensitive search algorithms convolve many different pre-calculated gravitational waveforms with the detector data and look for coincident matches between different detectors. Machine learning is being explored as an alternative approach to building a search algorithm that has the prospect to reduce computational costs and target more complex signals. In this work we construct a two-detector search for gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers using neural networks trained on non-spinning binary black hole data from a single detector. The network is applied to the data from both observatories independently and we check for events coincident in time between the two. This enables the efficient analysis of large quantities of background data by time-shifting the independent detector data. We find that while for a single detector the network retains $91.5\%$ of the sensitivity matched filtering can achieve, this number drops to $83.9\%$ for two observatories. To enable the network to check for signal consistency in the detectors, we then construct a set of simple networks that operate directly on data from both detectors. We find that none of these simple two-detector networks are capable of improving the sensitivity over applying networks individually to the data from the detectors and searching for time coincidences.