Application of Deep Reinforcement Learning to Major Solar Flare Forecasting

In this study, we present the application of deep reinforcement learning to the forecasting of major solar flares. For this, we consider full-disk magnetograms at 00:00 UT from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory/Michelson Doppler Imager (1996-2010) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (2011-2019), as well as Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite X-ray flare data. We apply Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Double DQN, which are popular deep reinforcement learning methods, to predict “Yes or No” for daily M- and X-class flare occurrence. The reward functions, consisting of four rewards for true positive, false positive, false negative, and true negative, are used for our models. The major results of this study are as follows. First, our deep-learning models successfully predict major solar flares with good skill scores, such as HSS, F1, TSS, and ApSS. Second, the performance of our models depends on the reward function, learning method, and target agent update time. Third, the performance of our deep-learning models is noticeably better than that of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model with the same structure: 0.38 (CNN) to 0.44 (ours) for HSS, 0.47 to 0.52 for F1, 0.53 to 0.59 for TSS, and 0.09 to 0.12 for ApSS.