Dilated convolutional neural network for detecting extreme-mass-ratio inspirals

What is it about?

The detection of extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) is intricate due to their complex waveforms, extended duration, and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), making them more challenging to be identified compared to compact binary coalescences. While matched filtering-based techniques are known for their computational demands, existing deep learning-based methods primarily handle time-domain data and are often constrained by data duration and SNR. In addition, most existing work ignores time delay interferometry (TDI) and applies the long-wavelength approximation in detector response calculations, thus limiting their ability to handle laser frequency noise. In this study, we introduce dilated convolutional neural network for detecting extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (DECODE), an end-to-end model focusing on EMRI signal detection by sequence modeling in the frequency domain. Centered around a dilated causal convolutional neural network, trained on synthetic data considering TDI-1.5 detector response, DECODE can efficiently process a year’s worth of multichannel TDI data with an SNR of around 50. We evaluate our model on one-year data with accumulated SNR ranging from 50 to 120 and achieve a true positive rate of 96.3% at a false positive rate of 1%, keeping an inference time of less than 0.01 seconds. With the visualization of three showcased EMRI signals for interpretability and generalization, DECODE exhibits strong potential for future space-based gravitational wave data analyses.

Featured Image

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash