Deep generative models of gravitational waveforms via conditional autoencoder

We construct few deep generative models of gravitational waveforms based on the semisupervising scheme of conditional autoencoders and its variational extensions. Once the training is done, we find that our best waveform model can generate the inspiral-merger waveforms of binary black hole coalescence with more than 97% average overlap matched filtering accuracy for the mass ratio between 1 and 10. Besides, the generation time of a single waveform takes about one millisecond, which is about 10 to 100 times faster than the effective-one-body-numerical-relativity algorithm running on the same computing facility. Moreover, these models can also help to explore the space of waveforms. That is, with mainly the low-mass-ratio training set, the resultant trained model is capable of generating large amount of accurate high-mass-ratio waveforms. This result implies that our generative model can speed up the waveform generation for the low latency search of gravitational wave events. With improvement of the accuracy in the future work, the generative waveform model may also help to speed up the parameter estimation and can assist the numerical relativity in generating the waveforms of higher mass ratio by progressively self-training.

Automated summary

By constructing deep generative models, researchers can accurately and quickly generate binary black hole merger waveforms, which may help improve efficiency in searching for and estimating parameters of gravitational wave events.