Classification of Gravitational Waves from Black Hole-Neutron Star Mergers with Machine Learning

This study developed a machine learning-based methodology to classify gravitational wave (GW) signals from black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers by combining convolutional neural network (CNN) with conditional information for feature extraction. The model was trained and validated on a dataset of simulated GW signals injected to Gaussian noise to mimic real world signals. We considered all three types of merger: binary black hole (BBH), binary neutron star (BNS) and neutron star-black hole (NSBH). We achieved up to 96% correct classification of GW signals sources. Incorporating our novel conditional information approach improved classification accuracy by 10% compared to standard time series training. Additionally, to show the effectiveness of our method, we tested the model with real GW data from the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3) and successfully classified ~90% of signals. These results are an important step towards low-latency real-time GW detection.