Neural networks for automated classification of ionospheric irregularities in HF radar backscattered signals

The classification of high frequency (HF) radar backscattered signals from the ionospheric irregularities (clutters) into those suitable, or not, for further analysis, is a time-consuming task even by experts in the field. We tested several different feedforward neural networks on this task, investigating the effects of network type (single layer versus multilayer) and number of hidden nodes upon performance. As expected, the multilayer feedforward networks (MLFNs) outperformed the single-layer networks. The MLFNs achieved performance levels of 100% correct on the training set and up to 98% correct on the testing set. Comparable figures for the single-layer networks were 94.5% and 92%, respectively. When measures of sensitivity, specificity, and proportion of variance accounted for by the model are considered, the superiority of the MLFNs over the single-layer networks is much more striking. Our results suggest that such neural networks could aid many HF radar operations such as frequency search, space weather, etc.