Extension of the characterization of non-Gaussianity in gravitational wave detectors with a statistical hypothesis test

Abstract In gravitational wave (GW) astronomy, non-Gaussian noise, such as scattered light noise disturbs stable interferometer operation, limiting the interferometer’s sensitivity, and reducing the reliability of the analyses. In scattered light noise, the non-Gaussian noise dominates the sensitivity in a low frequency range of less than a few hundred Hz, which is sensitive to GWs from compact binary coalescence. This non-Gaussian noise prevents reliable parameter estimation, since several analysis methods are optimized only for Gaussian noise. Therefore, identifying data contaminated by non-Gaussian noise is important. In this work, we extended the conventional method to evaluate non-Gaussian noise, the Rayleigh statistic, by using a statistical hypothesis test to determine a threshold for non-Gaussian noise. First, we estimated the distribution of the Rayleigh statistic against Gaussian noise, called the background distribution, and validated that our extension serves as the hypothetical test. The threshold on the Rayleigh statistic is estimated at 0.73 and 1.28 when the significance level is 0.05, and the sample size is 39. Moreover, we investigated the detection efficiency by assuming two non-Gaussian noise models. For example, for the model with strong scattered light noise, the true positive rate (TPR) was always above 0.7 when the significance level was 0.05. For the demonstration, we applied our extension with the estimated thresholds to the real data. We confirmed our extension provides the binarized outputs of the statistical tests and contributes to finding the non-Gaussian noise in the real data. The results showed that our extension can contribute to an initial detection of non-Gaussian noise and lead to further investigation of the origin of the non-Gaussian noise.