Classification of Cassini’s Orbit Regions as Magnetosphere, Magnetosheath, and Solar Wind via Machine Learning

Several machine learning algorithms and feature subsets from a variety of particle and magnetic field instruments on-board the Cassini spacecraft were explored for their utility in classifying orbit segments as magnetosphere, magnetosheath or solar wind. Using a list of manually detected magnetopaus...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kiley L. Yeakel, Jon D. Vandegriff, Tadhg M. Garton, Caitriona M. Jackman, George Clark, Sarah K. Vines, Andrew W. Smith, Peter Kollmann
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-05-01
Series:Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
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Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2022.875985/full
Description
Summary:Several machine learning algorithms and feature subsets from a variety of particle and magnetic field instruments on-board the Cassini spacecraft were explored for their utility in classifying orbit segments as magnetosphere, magnetosheath or solar wind. Using a list of manually detected magnetopause and bow shock crossings from mission scientists, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR) and recurrent neural network long short-term memory (RNN LSTM) classification algorithms were trained and tested. A detailed error analysis revealed a RNN LSTM model provided the best overall performance with a 93.1% accuracy on the unseen test set and MCC score of 0.88 when utilizing 60 min of magnetometer data (|B|, Bθ, Bϕ and BR) to predict the region at the final time step. RF models using a combination of magnetometer and particle data, spanning H+, He+, He++ and electrons at a single time step, provided a nearly equivalent performance with a test set accuracy of 91.4% and MCC score of 0.84. Derived boundary crossings from each model’s region predictions revealed that the RNN model was able to successfully detect 82.1% of labeled magnetopause crossings and 91.2% of labeled bow shock crossings, while the RF model using magnetometer and particle data detected 82.4 and 74.3%, respectively.
ISSN:2296-987X