  Despite recent progress in numerical simulations of the coalescence of binary
black hole systems, highly asymmetric spinning systems and the construction of
accurate physical templates remain challenging and computationally expensive.
We explore the feasibility of a prompt and robust test of whether the signals
exhibit evidence for generic features that can educate new simulations. We form
catalogs of numerical relativity waveforms with distinct physical effects and
compute the relative probability that a gravitational wave signal belongs to
each catalog. We introduce an algorithm designed to perform this task for
coalescence signals using principal component analysis of waveform catalogs and
Bayesian model selection and demonstrate its effectiveness.
