Equatorial Plasma Bubble Detection by Support Vector Machine at Chumphon Station, Thailand

Abstract

Equatorial Plasma Bubble (EPB) is a phenomenon in which depletion of plasma density occurs in the ionosphere particularly in the equatorial region. It can degrade the performances of the navigation system and satellite communication. In this work, we analyze EPB based on the very-high frequency (VHF) radar images at Chumphon station, Thailand. Then an EPB detection system using the support vector machine (SVM) technique is developed, and the accuracies of the systems using different kernels: linear kernel, the polynomial kernel, the radial basic functions kernel (RBF), and the sigmoid kernel are compared. Among the different kernels, we find that the RBF kernel gives the highest accuracy in prediction at 86.67 percent.