2 October 2026
School of Sciences, University of Minho
Europe/Lisbon timezone

VIGILant: an automatic classification pipeline for glitches in the Virgo detector

2 Oct 2026, 16:30
20m
Anfiteatro de Física, Ed. 6 - 1.02 (School of Sciences, University of Minho)

Anfiteatro de Física, Ed. 6 - 1.02

School of Sciences, University of Minho

Physics Department, School of Sciences Campus de Gualtar, Braga

Speaker

Tiago Fernandes

Description

Glitches frequently contaminate data in gravitational-wave detectors, complicating the observation and analysis of astrophysical signals. This work introduces VIGILant, an automatic pipeline for classification and visualization of glitches in the Virgo detector. Using a curated dataset of Virgo O3b glitches, two machine learning approaches are evaluated: tree-based models (Decision Tree, Random Forest and XGBoost) using structured Omicron parameters, and Convolutional Neural Networks (ResNet) trained on spectrogram images.
While tree-based models offer higher interpretability and fast training, the ResNet34 model achieved superior performance, reaching a F1 score of 0.9772 and accuracy of 0.9833 in the testing set, with inference times of tens of milliseconds per glitch. The pipeline has been deployed for daily operation at the Virgo site since observing run O4c, providing the Virgo collaboration with an interactive dashboard to monitor glitch populations and detector behavior. The pipeline also identifies low-confidence predictions, highlighting glitches requiring further attention.

Which topic best fits your talk? Astrophysics and Cosmology

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