Solar Flare Forecasting from Magnetic Feature Properties Generated by Solar Monitor Active Region Tracker

We study the predictive capabilities of magnetic feature properties (MF) generated by Solar Monitor Active Region Tracker (SMART) Higgins et al.(Adv. Space Res. 47, 2105, 2011) for solar flare forecasting from two datasets: the full dataset of SMART detections from 1996 to 2010 that has been previously studied by Ahmed et al. (Solar Phys. 283(1), 179, 2011) and a subset of that dataset which only includes detections that are NOAA active regions (ARs).

Main contributions: we use marginal relevance as a filter feature selection method to identify most useful SMART MF properties for separating flaring from nonflaring detections and logistic regression to derive classification rules to predict future observations. For comparison, we employ a Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and a set of Deep Neural Network models, as well as Lasso for feature selection. Using the linear model with three features we obtain significantly better results (TSS=0.84) to those reported by Ahmed et al. (Solar Phys. 283(1), 179, 2011) for the full dataset of SMART detections. The same model produced competitive results (TSS=0.67) for the dataset of SMART detections that are NOAA ARs which can be compared to a broader section of flare forecasting literature. We show that more complex models are not required for this data.