Information-theoretic approach to the gravitational-wave burst detection problem
Nov 18, 2015
17 pages
Published in:
- Phys.Rev.D 95 (2017) 10, 104046
- Published: May 30, 2017
e-Print:
- 1511.05955 [gr-qc]
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Abstract: (APS)
The observational era of gravitational-wave astronomy began in the fall of 2015 with the detection of GW150914. One potential type of detectable gravitational wave is short-duration gravitational-wave bursts, whose waveforms can be difficult to predict. We present the framework for a detection algorithm for such burst events—oLIB—that can be used in low latency to identify gravitational-wave transients. This algorithm consists of (1) an excess-power event generator based on the Q transform—Omicron—, (2) coincidence of these events across a detector network, and (3) an analysis of the coincident events using a Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian evidence calculator—LALInferenceBurst. These steps compress the full data streams into a set of Bayes factors for each event. Through this process, we use elements from information theory to minimize the amount of information regarding the signal-versus-noise hypothesis that is lost. We optimally extract this information using a likelihood-ratio test to estimate a detection significance for each event. Using representative archival LIGO data across different burst waveform morphologies, we show that the algorithm can detect gravitational-wave burst events of astrophysical strength in realistic instrumental noise. We also demonstrate that the combination of Bayes factors by means of a likelihood-ratio test can improve the detection efficiency of a gravitational-wave burst search. Finally, we show that oLIB’s performance is robust against the choice of gravitational-wave populations used to model the likelihood-ratio test likelihoods.- gravitational radiation: burst
- gravitational radiation detector
- Monte Carlo: Markov chain
- Bayesian
- statistics
- efficiency
- trigger
- LIGO
- information theory
- interferometer
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