  The recent completion of Advanced LIGO suggests that gravitational waves
(GWs) may soon be directly observed. Past searches for gravitational-wave
transients have been impacted by transient noise artifacts, known as glitches,
introduced into LIGO data due to instrumental and environmental effects. In
this work, we explore how waveform complexity, instead of signal-to-noise
ratio, can be used to rank event candidates and distinguish short duration
astrophysical signals from glitches. We test this framework using a new
hierarchical pipeline that directly compares the Bayesian evidence of explicit
signal and glitch models. The hierarchical pipeline is shown to have strong
performance, and in particular, allows high-confidence detections of a range of
waveforms at realistic signal-to-noise ratio with a two detector network.
