Pulsar candidate identification using semi-supervised generative adversarial networks

Machine learning methods are increasingly helping astronomers identify new radio pulsars. However, they require a large amount of labelled data, which is time consuming to produce and biased. Here, we describe a Semi-supervised generative adversarial network, which achieves better classification performance than the standard supervised algorithms using majority unlabelled data sets. We achieved an accuracy and mean F-Score of 94.9 percent trained on only 100 labelled candidates and 5000 unlabelled candidates compared to our standard supervised baseline which scored at 81.1 percent and 82.7 percent, respectively. Our final model trained on a much larger labelled data set achieved an accuracy and mean F-score value of 99.2 percent and a recall rate of 99.7 percent. This technique allows for high-quality classification during the early stages of pulsar surveys on new instruments when limited labelled data are available. We open-source our work along with a new pulsar-candidate data set produced from the High Time Resolution Universe - South Low Latitude Survey. This data set has the largest number of pulsar detections of any public data set and we hope it will be a valuable tool for benchmarking future machine learning models.

Automated summary

Machine learning methods are increasingly being used to help astronomers identify new radio pulsars, with the Semi-supervised generative adversarial network achieving better classification performance than standard supervised algorithms. By training on majority unlabelled data sets, the technique significantly improves accuracy and F-score values.