27–30 Jul 2026
Engineering Research Center, Brown University
US/Eastern timezone

An Improved ML Method for RFI Identification in MWA EoR Data

Not scheduled
20m
Main sessions: Room 190, Break-out sessions: Room 125 (Engineering Research Center, Brown University)

Main sessions: Room 190, Break-out sessions: Room 125

Engineering Research Center, Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island
Presentation Epoch of Reionization

Speaker

Aidan LaBella (Brown University)

Description

We investigate a strategy for improving radio frequency interference (RFI) flagging using roughly 60 hours of observations from the 2016 EoR high-band observing run of the Murchison Widefield Array. We develop a novel machine learning-based \textit{weak supervision} method where traditional flagging methods such as AOFlagger, SSINS, $\chi^2$, X-RFI and EAVILS are used to generate stronger labels for training. Visibilities in observations are aggregated into statistical summaries and treated as tabular data for a transformer-based classifier. To evaluate our classifier we create a large, 10-hour, human-annotated ground-truth dataset enabled by novel annotation software. We find that our models outperform the traditional RFI flagging methods on F1 score and are able to flag a wide variety of RFI events.

Authors

Aidan LaBella (Brown University) Jade Ducharme (Brown University) Jonathan Pober (Brown) Shawn Dubey Prof. Stephen Bach (Brown University)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.