Papers › Detection of gravitational-wave signals from binary neutron star mergers using machine learning
Detection of gravitational-wave signals from binary neutron star mergers using machine learning
Marlin B. Schäfer, Frank Ohme, Alexander H. Nitz
As two neutron stars merge, they emit gravitational waves that can potentially be detected by earth bound detectors. Matched-filtering based algorithms have traditionally been used to extract quiet signals embedded in noise. We introduce a novel neural-network based machine learning algorithm that uses time series strain data from gravitational-wave detectors to detect signals from non-spinning binary neutron star mergers. For the Advanced LIGO design sensitivity, our network has an average sensitive distance of 130 Mpc at a false-alarm rate of 10 per month. Compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, we find an improvement by a factor of 6 in sensitivity to signals with signal-to-noise ratio below 25. However, this approach is not yet competitive with traditional matched-filtering based methods. A conservative estimate indicates that our algorithm introduces on average 10.2 s of latency between signal arrival and generating an alert. We give an exact description of our testing procedure, which can not only be applied to machine learning based algorithms but all other search algorithms as well. We thereby improve the ability to compare machine learning and classical searches.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections