A sequential data mining method for modelling solar magnetic cycles

We propose an adaptive data-driven approach to modelling solar magnetic activity cyclesbased on a sequential link between unsupervised and supervised modelling. Monthly sunspot numbers spanning over hundreds of years – from the mid-18th century to the first quarter of 2012 - obtained from the Royal Greenwich Observatory provide a reliable source of training and validation sets.An indicator variable is used to generate class labels and internal parameters which are used to separate high from low activity cycles. Our results show that by maximising data-dependent parameters and using them as inputs to a support vector machine model we obtain comparatively more robust and reliable predictions. Finally, we demonstrate how the method can be adapted to other unsupervised and supervised modelling applications. Keywords : Data clustering – Data mining – Predictive modelling – Solar magnetic activity – Sunspots – Supervised modelling – Support Vector Machines – Unsupervised Modelling