Signal based vetoes for the detection of gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries -: art. no. 022002

The matched filtering technique is used to search for gravitational wave signals of a known form in the data taken by ground-based detectors. However, the analyzed data contains a number of artifacts arising from various broad-band transients (glitches) of instrumental or environmental origin which can appear with high signal-to-noise ratio on the matched filtering output. This paper describes several techniques to discriminate genuine events from the false ones, based on our knowledge of the signals we look for. Starting with the chi(2) discriminator, we show how it may be optimized for free parameters. We then introduce several alternative vetoing statistics and discuss their performance using data from the GEO 600 detector.