Browsing by Author "Agbetsiafa, Insight Enya Aku"
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- ItemAn RFI simulation pipeline to help teach interferometry and machine learning(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-04) Agbetsiafa, Insight Enya Aku; De Villiers, Dirk; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: An interferometer is a collection of radio antennas that together form one instrument. Machine Learning is the collective term that is used to refer to a set of algorithms that can automatically learn to perform a specific task if it is provided with training examples. Interferometry has become an intricate part of the scientific landscape in South Africa with the advent of MeerKAT. Similarly, utilizing Machine Learning (ML to improve our lives has grown in popularity worldwide. Machine Learning is nowadays used to determine the likes of people, to interpret human utterings, to automatically classify images and the like. As these two fields grow in popularity and importance within the South African context, so does the development of tools that can aid in teaching these fields to undergraduate students. A major problem for radio observatories worldwide is Radio Frequency Interference (RFI. RFI can be detected using ML. A simulator that can simulate interferometric observations that are corrupted by RFI can serve as a testbed for different ML approaches. Moreover, if the simulator is simplistic enough it can even be utilized as a teaching tool. In this thesis such a simulator is developed. This simulator can aid in teaching students how visibilities can be simulated and how RFI can be detected via ML. In effect, one tool that can help teach two relevant undergraduate topics, namely interferometry and ML. In particular, an experiment is proposed which an undergraduate student can repeat to gain a deeper understanding of interferometry and ML. In this experiment, visibilities are simulated, RFI is injected and detected using four different ML techniques, namely Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, k-means and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The results are then analysed and conclusions are drawn. For the simplistic setup considered here, the ranking of the four algorithms is from best to worst: Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, GMM and then k-means. In the future, if the simulator is extended somewhat, it can also be used as a testbed for comparing numerous other ML algorithms. The thesis also provides a comprehensive review of all the theory that a student requires to master both interferometry and ML.