16–20 Jun 2025
THotel, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy
Europe/Rome timezone

Identifying and Mitigating Machine Learning Biases for the Gravitational Wave Detection Problem

Not scheduled
20m
THotel, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy

THotel, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy

Via dei Giudicati, 66, 09131 Cagliari (CA), Italy
Poster + Flashtalk Explainability & Theory

Speaker

Narenraju Nagarajan (University of Glasgow)

Description

Our work identifies the sources of 11 interconnected machine learning (ML) biases that hinder the generalisation of supervised learning models in the context of gravitational wave (GW) detection. We use GW domain knowledge to propose a set of mitigation tactics and training strategies for ML algorithms that aim to address these biases concurrently and improve detection sensitivity. We empirically prove that our approach leads to [i] detection sensitivities that rival current matched filtering pipelines in real noise at low false alarm rates, [ii] the ability to handle out-of-distribution noise power spectral densities, [iii] the ability to strongly reject non-Gaussian transient noise artefacts, and [iv] data efficient learning of the detection problem.

Via the injection study introduced in the Machine Learning Gravitational-Wave Search Challenge, we show that our search pipeline (Sage) detects ~11.2% more signals than the benchmark PyCBC search at a false alarm rate of 1 per month and >48% than previous machine learning based detection pipelines. In light of the identified biases, we demonstrate that existing detection sensitivity metrics are unreliable for machine-learning pipelines and discuss the trustworthiness of ML results. By studying machine-learning biases and conducting empirical investigations to understand the reasons for performance improvement/degradation, we aim to address the need for interpretability of machine-learning methods in GW science. Link to the paper

AI keywords AI Interpretability; Machine Learning Biases; Data Efficient Learning; Detection;

Primary author

Narenraju Nagarajan (University of Glasgow)

Co-author

Dr Christopher Messenger (University of Glasgow)

Presentation materials

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