Keywords:radio transients; radio astronomy; anomaly detection; time series analysis; machine learning
Publisher:Pasadena, CA : Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2011.
Citation:Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding, Mountain View, California, October 20, 2011.
Abstract:
We present a semi-supervised online method for novelty detection and evaluate its performance for radio astronomy time series data. Our approach uses adaptive eigenbases to combine 1) prior knowledge about uninteresting signals with 2) online estimation of the current data properties to enable highly sensitive and precise detection of novel signals. We apply the method to the problem of detecting fast transient radio anomalies and compare it to current alternative algorithms. Tests based on observations from the Parkes Multibeam Survey show both effective detection of interesting rare events and robustness to known false alarm anomalies.