Template-Free Gravitational Wave Detection with CWT-LSTM Autoencoders: A Case Study of Run-Dependent Calibration Effects in LIGO Data

Abstract

Gravitational wave detection requires sophisticated signal processing to identify weak astrophysical signals buried in instrumental noise. Traditional matched filtering approaches face computational challenges with diverse signal morphologies and non-stationary noise. This work presents an unsupervised deep learning methodology integrating CWT preprocessing with LSTM autoencoder architecture for template-free gravitational wave detection. The CWT time-frequency decomposition captures chirp evolution and transient characteristics essential for compact binary coalescence identification. We train and evaluate our model on LIGO H1 data comprising of detector noise and confirmed gravitational wave events from the GWTC-4.0 catalog. During development, we discovered that reconstruction errors from multi-run training (O1-O4) clustered by observing run rather than astrophysical parameters, revealing systematic batch effects from GWOSC's evolving calibration procedures. We adopted single-run (O4) training, which eliminated these batch effects and improved recall from 52% to 96% while maintaining 97% precision. The final model achieves strong performance on O4 test data: 97.0% precision, 96.1% recall, and ROC-AUC 0.994 (102 signals, 399 noise segments). The reconstruction error distribution shows clean unimodal separation between noise (mean 0.48) and signals (mean 0.77), with only 4 missed detections and 3 false alarms. This unsupervised, template-free approach demonstrates that anomaly detection can achieve performance competitive with supervised methods. While the template-free nature of this approach suggests sensitivity to signals outside existing template banks, this capability remains to be validated. Our identification and resolution of cross-run batch effects provides methodological guidance for future machine learning applications to multi-epoch gravitational wave datasets.