Waves in a forest: a random forest classifier to distinguish between gravitational waves and detector glitches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network of gravitational-wave (GW) detectors have observed many tens of compact binary mergers to date. Transient, non-Gaussian noise excursions, known as ‘glitches’, can impact signal detection in various ways. They can imitate true signals as well as reduce the confidence of real signals. In this work, we introduce a novel statistical tool to distinguish astrophysical signals from glitches, using their inferred source parameter posterior distributions as a feature set. By modelling both simulated GW signals and real detector glitches with a gravitational waveform model, we obtain a diverse set of posteriors which are used to train a random forest classifier. We show that random forests can identify differences in the posterior distributions for signals and glitches, aggregating these differences to tell apart signals from common glitch types with high accuracy of over 93%. We conclude with a discussion on the regions of parameter space where the classifier is prone to making misclassifications, and the different ways of implementing this tool into LVK analysis pipelines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".