Scalable Solutions for Automated Single Pulse Identification and Classification in Radio Astronomy

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, parallel approach for detecting and classifying radio pulsar signals in large datasets using Apache Spark and machine learning, significantly improving speed and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable Spark-based detection algorithm and a novel multiclass machine learning technique with feature selection for faster pulsar classification.

Findings

Speedup of up to 5X in candidate identification

54% average speed improvement in machine learning classification

Less than 2% reduction in classification accuracy

Abstract

Data collection for scientific applications is increasing exponentially and is forecasted to soon reach peta- and exabyte scales. Applications which process and analyze scientific data must be scalable and focus on execution performance to keep pace. In the field of radio astronomy, in addition to increasingly large datasets, tasks such as the identification of transient radio signals from extrasolar sources are computationally expensive. We present a scalable approach to radio pulsar detection written in Scala that parallelizes candidate identification to take advantage of in-memory task processing using Apache Spark on a YARN distributed system. Furthermore, we introduce a novel automated multiclass supervised machine learning technique that we combine with feature selection to reduce the time required for candidate classification. Experimental testing on a Beowulf cluster with 15 data nodes shows that the parallel implementation of the identification algorithm offers a speedup of up to 5X that of a similar multithreaded implementation. Further, we show that the combination of automated multiclass classification and feature selection speeds up the execution performance of the RandomForest machine learning algorithm by an average of 54% with less than a 2% average reduction in the algorithm's ability to correctly classify pulsars. The generalizability of these results is demonstrated by using two real-world radio astronomy data sets.