Investigation of Solar Flare Classification to Identify Optimal Performance

Abstract

When an intense brightness for a small amount of time is seen in the sun, then we can say that a solar flare emerged. As solar flares are made up of high energy photons and particles, thus causing the production of high electric fields and currents and therefore results in the disruption in space-borne or ground-based technological system. It also becomes a challenging task to extract its important features for prediction. Convolutional Neural Networks have gain a significant amount of popularity in the classification and localization tasks. This paper has given stress on the classification of the solar flares emerged on different years by stacking different convolutional layers followed by max pooling layers. From the reference of Alexnet, the pooling layer employed in this paper is the overlapping pooling. Also two different activation functions that are ELU and CReLU have been used to investigate how many number of convolutional layers with a particular activation function provides with the best results on this dataset as the size of the dataset in this domain is always small. The proposed investigation can be further used in a novel solar prediction systems.