Characterizing seismic isolation using convolutional neural networks and Wiener filters

We investigate seismic motion propagation through a passively isolated mechanical system, using Wiener filters and convolutional neural networks with time-dilation layers. The goal of this study was to explore the capabilities of neural networks and Wiener filters in characterizing a mechanical system from the measurements. The mechanical system used is a testbed facility for technology development for current and future gravitational-wave detectors, “VATIGrav”, currently being commissioned at the University of Hamburg. It consists of a large vacuum chamber mounted on four active vibration isolators with an optical table inside, mounted on four passive vibration isolators. In this paper, we have used seismic data recorded on the ground and on the optical table inside the chamber. The data were divided in 6 h for training and another 6 h for validation, focusing on inferring 150-s stretches of time series of table motion from the ground motion in the frequency range from 0.1 Hz to about 50 Hz. We compare the performance of a neural network with fast Fourier transform-based loss function and with Huber loss function to single-input, single-output (SISO) and multiple-input, single-output (MISO) Wiener filters. To be able to compute very large MISO Wiener filters (with 15 000 taps) we have optimized the calculations exploiting block-Toeplitz structure of the matrix in Wiener-Hopf equations. We find that for the given task, SISO Wiener filters outperform MISO Wiener filters, mostly due to low coherence between different motion axes. Neural network trained with Huber loss performs slightly worse than Wiener filters. Neural network with FFT-based loss outperforms Wiener filters in some frequency regions, particularly with low amplitudes and reduced coherence, while it tends to slightly underestimate the peaks, where Wiener filters perform better.