Multiple CNN Variants and Ensemble Learning for Sunspot Group Classification by Magnetic Type

A solar active region is a source of disturbance for the Sun–terrestrial space environment and usually causes extreme space weather, such as geomagnetic storms. The main indicator of an active region is sunspots. Certain types of sunspots are related to extreme space weather caused by eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections or solar flares. Thus, the automatic classification of sunspot groups is helpful to predict solar activity quickly and accurately. This paper completed the automatic classification of a sunspot group data set based on the Mount Wilson classification scheme, which contains continuum and magnetogram images provided by the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager SHARP data from 2010 May 1 to 2017 December 12. After applying some data preprocessing steps such as image cropping and data standardization, the features of magnetic type in the data are more obvious, and the amount of data is increased. The processed data are spliced into two frames of single-channel data for the neural network to perform 3D convolution operations. This paper constructs a variety of convolutional neural networks with different structures and numbers of layers, selects 10 models as representatives, and chooses XGBoost, which is commonly used in ensemble-learning algorithms, to fuse the results of independent classification models. We found that XGBoost is an effective way to fuse models, which is proved by the relatively balanced high scores in the three magnetic types. The accuracy of the ensemble model is above 92%. The F1 scores of the magnetic types of Alpha, Beta, and Beta-x reached 0.95, 0.91, and 0.82 respectively.