Current templated searches for gravitational waves (GWs) emanated from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) assume that the binaries have circularized by the time they enter the sensitivity band of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network. However, certain formation channels predict that in future observing runs (O4 and beyond), a fraction of detectable binaries could enter the sensitivity band with a measurable eccentricity $e$. Constraining $e$ for each GW event with Bayesian parameter estimation methods is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This motivates the need for a machine learning based identification and classification scheme, which could weed out the majority of GW events as non-eccentric and drastically reduce the set of candidate eccentric GWs. As a proof of principle, we train a separable-convolutional neural network (SCNN) with spectrograms of synthetic GWs added to Gaussian noise characterized by O4 representative \texttt{PSD}s. We use the trained network to (i) segregate candidates as either eccentric or non-eccentric (henceforth called the detection problem) and (ii) classify the events as non-eccentric $(e = 0)$, moderately eccentric $(e \in (0, 0.2])$, and highly eccentric $(e \in (0.2, 0.5])$. On the detection problem, our best performing network detects eccentricity with $0.914$ accuracy and true and false positive rates of $0.862$ and $0.138$, respectively. On the classification problem, the best performing network classifies signals with $0.853$ accuracy. We find that our trained detector displays close to ideal behavior for the data we consider.
Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables