TY - JOUR
T1 - A comparison of machine learning methods to classify radioactive elements using prompt-gamma-ray neutron activation data
AU - Mathew, Jino
AU - Kshirsagar, Rohit
AU - Abidin, Dzariff Z
AU - Griffin, James
AU - Kanarachos, Stratis
AU - James, Jithin
AU - Alamaniotis, Miltiadis
AU - Fitzpatrick, Michael E
N1 - This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
PY - 2023/6/19
Y1 - 2023/6/19
N2 - The detection of illicit radiological materials is critical to establishing a robust second line of defence in nuclear security. Neutron-capture prompt-gamma activation analysis (PGAA) can be used to detect multiple radioactive materials across the entire Periodic Table. However, long detection times and a high rate of false positives pose a significant hindrance in the deployment of PGAA-based systems to identify the presence of illicit substances in nuclear forensics. In the present work, six different machine-learning algorithms were developed to classify radioactive elements based on the PGAA energy spectra. The model performance was evaluated using standard classification metrics and trend curves with an emphasis on comparing the effectiveness of algorithms that are best suited for classifying imbalanced datasets. We analyse the classification performance based on Precision, Recall, F1-score, Specificity, Confusion matrix, ROC-AUC curves, and Geometric Mean Score (GMS) measures. The tree-based algorithms (Decision Trees, Random Forest and AdaBoost) have consistently outperformed Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbours. Based on the results presented, AdaBoost is the preferred classifier to analyse data containing PGAA spectral information due to the high recall and minimal false negatives reported in the minority class. [Abstract copyright: © 2023. The Author(s).]
AB - The detection of illicit radiological materials is critical to establishing a robust second line of defence in nuclear security. Neutron-capture prompt-gamma activation analysis (PGAA) can be used to detect multiple radioactive materials across the entire Periodic Table. However, long detection times and a high rate of false positives pose a significant hindrance in the deployment of PGAA-based systems to identify the presence of illicit substances in nuclear forensics. In the present work, six different machine-learning algorithms were developed to classify radioactive elements based on the PGAA energy spectra. The model performance was evaluated using standard classification metrics and trend curves with an emphasis on comparing the effectiveness of algorithms that are best suited for classifying imbalanced datasets. We analyse the classification performance based on Precision, Recall, F1-score, Specificity, Confusion matrix, ROC-AUC curves, and Geometric Mean Score (GMS) measures. The tree-based algorithms (Decision Trees, Random Forest and AdaBoost) have consistently outperformed Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbours. Based on the results presented, AdaBoost is the preferred classifier to analyse data containing PGAA spectral information due to the high recall and minimal false negatives reported in the minority class. [Abstract copyright: © 2023. The Author(s).]
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85162670181&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41598-023-36832-8
DO - 10.1038/s41598-023-36832-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 37336914
SN - 2045-2322
VL - 13
JO - Scientific Reports
JF - Scientific Reports
IS - 1
M1 - 9948
ER -