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1. Improving Solar Flare Prediction by Time Series Outlier Detection

   Wen, J. ; Islam, M.R. ; Ahmadzadeh, A. ; Angryk, R.A. ( January 2023 , Lecture notes in computer science)

   Rutkowski, L. ; Scherer, R. ; Korytkowski, M. ; Pedrycz W. ; Tadeusiewicz R. ; Zurada J. (Ed.)

   Solar flares not only pose risks to outer space technologies and astronauts’ well being, but also cause disruptions on earth to our high-tech, interconnected infrastructure our lives highly depend on. While a number of machine-learning methods have been proposed to improve flare prediction, none of them, to the best of our knowledge, have investigated the impact of outliers on the reliability and robustness of those models’ performance. In this study, we investigate the impact of outliers in a multivariate time series benchmark dataset, namely SWAN-SF, on flare prediction models, and test our hypothesis. That is, there exist outliers in SWAN-SF, removal of which enhances the performance of the prediction models on unseen datasets. We employ Isolation Forest to detect the outliers among the weaker flare instances. Several experiments are carried out using a large range of contamination rates which determine the percentage of present outliers. We assess the quality of each dataset in terms of its actual contamination using TimeSeriesSVC. In our best findings, we achieve a 279% increase in True Skill Statistic and 68% increase in Heidke Skill Score. The results show that overall a significant improvement can be achieved for flare prediction if outliers are detected and removed properly. 

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2. Explaining Full-disk Deep Learning Model for Solar Flare Prediction using Attribution Methods

   Pandey, Chetraj ; Angryk, Rafal ; Aydin, Berkay ( January 2023 , European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases)

   Solar flares are transient space weather events that pose a significant threat to space and ground-based technological systems, making their precise and reliable prediction crucial for mitigating potential impacts. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on deep learning methods for solar flare prediction, primarily focusing on highly overlooked near-limb flares and utilizing the attribution methods to provide a post hoc qualitative explanation of the model’s predictions. We present a solar flare prediction model, which is trained using hourly full-disk line-of-sight magnetogram images and employs a binary prediction mode to forecast ≥M-class flares that may occur within the following 24-hour period. To address the class imbalance, we employ a fusion of data augmentation and class weighting techniques; and evaluate the overall performance of our model using the true skill statistic (TSS) and Heidke skill score (HSS). Moreover, we applied three attribution methods, namely Guided Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping, Integrated Gradients, and Deep Shapley Additive Explanations, to interpret and cross-validate our model’s predictions with the explanations. Our analysis revealed that full-disk prediction of solar flares aligns with characteristics related to active regions (ARs). In particular, the key findings of this study are: (1) our deep learning models achieved an average TSS∼0.51 and HSS∼0.35, and the results further demonstrate a competent capability to predict near-limb solar flares and (2) the qualitative analysis of the model’s explanation indicates that our model identifies and uses features associated with ARs in central and near-limb locations from full-disk magnetograms to make corresponding predictions. In other words, our models learn the shape and texture-based characteristics of flaring ARs even when they are at near-limb areas, which is a novel and critical capability that has significant implications for operational forecasting. 

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3. Towards coupling full-disk and active region-based flare prediction for operational space weather forecasting

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2022.897301  

   Pandey, Chetraj ; Ji, Anli ; Angryk, Rafal A. ; Georgoulis, Manolis K. ; Aydin, Berkay ( August 2022 , Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences)

   Solar flare prediction is a central problem in space weather forecasting and has captivated the attention of a wide spectrum of researchers due to recent advances in both remote sensing as well as machine learning and deep learning approaches. The experimental findings based on both machine and deep learning models reveal significant performance improvements for task specific datasets. Along with building models, the practice of deploying such models to production environments under operational settings is a more complex and often time-consuming process which is often not addressed directly in research settings. We present a set of new heuristic approaches to train and deploy an operational solar flare prediction system for ≥M1.0-class flares with two prediction modes: full-disk and active region-based. In full-disk mode, predictions are performed on full-disk line-of-sight magnetograms using deep learning models whereas in active region-based models, predictions are issued for each active region individually using multivariate time series data instances. The outputs from individual active region forecasts and full-disk predictors are combined to a final full-disk prediction result with a meta-model. We utilized an equal weighted average ensemble of two base learners’ flare probabilities as our baseline meta learner and improved the capabilities of our two base learners by training a logistic regression model. The major findings of this study are: 1) We successfully coupled two heterogeneous flare prediction models trained with different datasets and model architecture to predict a full-disk flare probability for next 24 h, 2) Our proposed ensembling model, i.e., logistic regression, improves on the predictive performance of two base learners and the baseline meta learner measured in terms of two widely used metrics True Skill Statistic (TSS) and Heidke Skill Score (HSS), and 3) Our result analysis suggests that the logistic regression-based ensemble (Meta-FP) improves on the full-disk model (base learner) by ∼9% in terms TSS and ∼10% in terms of HSS. Similarly, it improves on the AR-based model (base learner) by ∼17% and ∼20% in terms of TSS and HSS respectively. Finally, when compared to the baseline meta model, it improves on TSS by ∼10% and HSS by ∼15%. 

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4. Operational prediction of solar flares using a transformer-based framework

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40884-1  

   Abduallah, Yasser ; Wang, Jason T. L. ; Wang, Haimin ; Xu, Yan ( August 2023 , Scientific Reports)

   Solar flares are explosions on the Sun. They happen when energy stored in magnetic fields around solar active regions (ARs) is suddenly released. Solar flares and accompanied coronal mass ejections are sources of space weather, which negatively affects a variety of technologies at or near Earth, ranging from blocking high-frequency radio waves used for radio communication to degrading power grid operations. Monitoring and providing early and accurate prediction of solar flares is therefore crucial for preparedness and disaster risk management. In this article, we present a transformer-based framework, named SolarFlareNet, for predicting whether an AR would produce a$$\gamma$$$\gamma$-class flare within the next 24 to 72 h. We consider three$$\gamma$$$\gamma$classes, namely the$$\ge$$$\ge$M5.0 class, the$$\ge$$$\ge$M class and the$$\ge$$$\ge$C class, and build three transformers separately, each corresponding to a$$\gamma$$$\gamma$class. Each transformer is used to make predictions of its corresponding$$\gamma$$$\gamma$-class flares. The crux of our approach is to model data samples in an AR as time series and to use transformers to capture the temporal dynamics of the data samples. Each data sample consists of magnetic parameters taken from Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP) and related data products. We survey flare events that occurred from May 2010 to December 2022 using the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite X-ray flare catalogs provided by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and build a database of flares with identified ARs in the NCEI flare catalogs. This flare database is used to construct labels of the data samples suitable for machine learning. We further extend the deterministic approach to a calibration-based probabilistic forecasting method. The SolarFlareNet system is fully operational and is capable of making near real-time predictions of solar flares on the Web.

    

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5. Deep Neural Networks Based Solar Flare Prediction Using Compressed Full-disk Line-of-sight Magnetograms

   Pandey C. ; Angryk R. ; Aydin B. ( April 2022 , Communications in computer and information science)

   Lossio-Ventura J.A. ; Valverde-Rebaza J. ; Diaz E. ; Muñante D. ; Gavidia-Calderon C. ; Baria Valejo A.D. ; Alatrista-Salas H. (Ed.)

   The efforts in solar flare prediction have been engendered by the advancements in machine learning and deep learning methods. We present a new approach to flare prediction using full-disk compressed magnetogram images with Convolutional Neural Networks. We selected three prediction modes, among which two are binary for predicting the occurrence of ≥M1.0 and ≥C4.0 class flares and one is a multi-class mode for predicting the occurrence of more » « less