Used percentage veto for LIGO and virgo binary inspiral searches

A challenge for ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo is to understand the origin of non-astrophysical transients that contribute to the background noise, obscuring real astrophysically produced signals. To help this effort, there are a number of environmental and instrumental sensors around the site, recording data in “channels”. We developed a method called the used percentage veto to eliminate corrupted data based on the statistical correlation between transients in the gravitational wave channel and in the auxiliary channels. The results are used to improve inspiral binary searches on LIGO and Virgo data. We also developed a way to apply this method to help find the physical origin of such transients for detector characterization. After identifying statistically correlated channels, a followup code clusters coincident events between the gravitational wave channel and auxiliary channels, and thereby classifies noise by correlated channels. For each selected event, the code also gathers and creates information that is helpful for further investigations. The method is contributing to identifying problems and improving data quality for the LIGO S6 and Virgo VSR2 science runs. 14th Gravitational Waves Data Analysis Workshop IOP Publishing Journal of Physics: Conference Series 243 (2010) 012005 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/243/1/012005 c © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd 1 Used Percentage Veto for LIGO and Virgo Binary Inspiral Searches 2