4.5 Suboptimal filtering
To extract gravitational-wave signals from the detector’s noise one very often uses filters that are not
optimal. We may have to choose an approximate, suboptimal filter because we do not know the exact form
of the signal (this is almost always the case in practice) or in order to reduce the computational cost
and to simplify the analysis. In the case of the signal of the form given in Eq. (32) the most
natural and simplest way to proceed is to use as detection statistic the
-statistic where
the filters
(
) are the approximate ones instead of the optimal ones
(
) matched to the signal. In general the functions
will be
different from the functions
used in optimal filtering, and also the set of parameters
will be different from the set of parameters
in optimal filters. We call this procedure the
suboptimal filtering and we denote the suboptimal statistic by
. It is defined as [see Eq. (62)]
where the data-dependent
column matrix
and the square
matrix
have
components [see Eq. (60)]
We need a measure of how well a given suboptimal filter performs. To find such a measure we calculate
the expectation value of the suboptimal statistic
in the case where the data contains the
gravitational-wave signal, i.e., when
. We get
where we have introduced the matrix
with components
Let us rewrite the expectation value (113) in the following form,
where
is the optimal signal-to-noise ratio [given in Eq. (64)]. This expectation value reaches its
maximum equal to
when the filter is perfectly matched to the signal. Therefore, a natural
measure of the performance of a suboptimal filter is the quantity FF defined by
We call the quantity FF the generalized fitting factor. From the Rayleigh principle, it follows
that the generalized fitting factor is the maximum of the largest eigenvalue of the matrix
over the intrinsic parameters of the signal.
In the case of a gravitational-wave signal given by
the generalized fitting factor defined above reduces to the fitting factor introduced by Apostolatos [13]:
The fitting factor is the ratio of the maximal signal-to-noise ratio that can be achieved with suboptimal
filtering to the signal-to-noise ratio obtained when we use a perfectly matched, optimal filter. We
note that for the signal given by Eq. (117), FF is independent of the value of the amplitude
.
For the case of a signal of the form
where
is a constant phase, the maximum over
in Eq. (118) can be obtained analytically.
Moreover, assuming that over the bandwidth of the signal the spectral density of the noise is constant and
that over the observation time
oscillates rapidly, the fitting factor is approximately given by
In designing suboptimal filters one faces the issue of how small a fitting factor one can accept. A
popular rule of thumb is accepting
. Assuming that the amplitude of the signal and
consequently the signal-to-noise ratio decreases inversely proportionally to the distance from
the source this corresponds to 10% loss of the signals that would be detected by a matched
filter.
Proposals for good suboptimal (search) templates for the case of coalescing binaries are given
in [35, 134
] and for the case-spinning neutron stars in [65
, 18].