Abstract
The MAGIC-telescopes on the canary island of La Palma are two of the largest Cherenkov telescopes in the world, operating in stereoscopic mode since 2009 (Aleksić et al., Astropart. Phys. 35:435–448, 2012). A major step in the analysis of MAGIC data is the classification of observations into a gamma-ray signal and hadronic background. In this contribution we introduce the data provided by the MAGIC telescopes, which has some distinctive features. These features include high class imbalance, unknown and unequal misclassification costs as well as the absence of reliably labeled training data. We introduce a method to deal with some of these features. The method is based on a thresholding approach (Sheng and Ling 2006) and aims at minimization of the mean square error of an estimator, which is derived from the classification. The method is designed to fit into the special requirements of the MAGIC data.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the DFG, Collaborative Research Center SFB 876. We thank the ITMC at TU Dortmund University for providing computer resources on LiDo.
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Voigt, T., Fried, R., Backes, M., Rhode, W. (2014). Gamma-Hadron-Separation in the MAGIC Experiment. In: Spiliopoulou, M., Schmidt-Thieme, L., Janning, R. (eds) Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01595-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01595-8_13
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