Supervised Radio Frequency Interference Detection with SNNs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pritchard, Nicholas J., Wicenec, Andreas, Bennamoun, Mohammed, Dodson, Richard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pritchard, Nicholas J.
Wicenec, Andreas
Bennamoun, Mohammed
Dodson, Richard
author_facet Pritchard, Nicholas J.
Wicenec, Andreas
Bennamoun, Mohammed
Dodson, Richard
contents Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) poses a significant challenge in radio astronomy, arising from terrestrial and celestial sources, disrupting observations conducted by radio telescopes. Addressing RFI involves intricate heuristic algorithms, manual examination, and, increasingly, machine learning methods. Given the dynamic and temporal nature of radio astronomy observations, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) emerge as a promising approach. In this study, we cast RFI detection as a supervised multi-variate time-series segmentation problem. Notably, our investigation explores the encoding of radio astronomy visibility data for SNN inference, considering six encoding schemes: rate, latency, delta-modulation, and three variations of the step-forward algorithm. We train a small twolayer fully connected SNN on simulated data derived from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescope and perform extensive hyper-parameter optimization. Results reveal that latency encoding exhibits superior performance, achieving a per-pixel accuracy of 98.8% and an f1-score of 0.761. Remarkably, these metrics approach those of contemporary RFI detection algorithms, notwithstanding the simplicity and compactness of our proposed network architecture. This study underscores the potential of RFI detection as a benchmark problem for SNN researchers, emphasizing the efficacy of SNNs in addressing complex time-series segmentation tasks in radio astronomy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Supervised Radio Frequency Interference Detection with SNNs
Pritchard, Nicholas J.
Wicenec, Andreas
Bennamoun, Mohammed
Dodson, Richard
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) poses a significant challenge in radio astronomy, arising from terrestrial and celestial sources, disrupting observations conducted by radio telescopes. Addressing RFI involves intricate heuristic algorithms, manual examination, and, increasingly, machine learning methods. Given the dynamic and temporal nature of radio astronomy observations, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) emerge as a promising approach. In this study, we cast RFI detection as a supervised multi-variate time-series segmentation problem. Notably, our investigation explores the encoding of radio astronomy visibility data for SNN inference, considering six encoding schemes: rate, latency, delta-modulation, and three variations of the step-forward algorithm. We train a small twolayer fully connected SNN on simulated data derived from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescope and perform extensive hyper-parameter optimization. Results reveal that latency encoding exhibits superior performance, achieving a per-pixel accuracy of 98.8% and an f1-score of 0.761. Remarkably, these metrics approach those of contemporary RFI detection algorithms, notwithstanding the simplicity and compactness of our proposed network architecture. This study underscores the potential of RFI detection as a benchmark problem for SNN researchers, emphasizing the efficacy of SNNs in addressing complex time-series segmentation tasks in radio astronomy.
title Supervised Radio Frequency Interference Detection with SNNs
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06075