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Likelihood-Based One-Class Scoring in CWT Latent Space for Confusion-Limited LISA Gravitational-Wave Detection

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-02-25 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We study one-class scoring for resolvable-source detection in confusion-limited LISA time-series data represented as continuous-wavelet-transform (CWT) scalograms. With data generation and preprocessing held fixed, we benchmark geometry-style scoring against likelihood-style latent-density scoring, while also evaluating morphology-augmented and contrastive variants. Geometry-only and geometry+morphology methods provide modest gains over the reconstruction baseline, and contrastive variants do not show stable improvement. Likelihood scoring on AE latents is consistently stronger: across three seeds, latent-only likelihood reaches ROC-AUC 0.8555±0.01810.8555\pm 0.0181 and PR-AUC 0.9219±0.01180.9219 \pm 0.0118, versus ROC-AUC 0.7663±0.04500.7663 \pm 0.0450 and PR-AUC 0.8667±0.02550.8667 \pm 0.0255 for AE+manifold. These results indicate that explicit latent density modeling can outperform local off-manifold distance in this confusion-limited regime. We provide seed-based comparisons, unified ROC/PR visual summaries, and reproducible experimental artifacts to support follow-on work in LISA anomaly detection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.20212,
  title  = {Likelihood-Based One-Class Scoring in CWT Latent Space for Confusion-Limited LISA Gravitational-Wave Detection},
  author = {Jericho Cain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20212},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures