PoS - Proceedings of Science
Volume 301 - 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017) - Session Gamma-Ray Astronomy. GA-instrumentation
A citizen-science approach to muon events in imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope data: the Muon Hunter
Q. Feng*, J. Jarvis  on behalf of the VERITAS Collaboration
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: August 16, 2017
Published on: August 03, 2018
Abstract
Event classification is a common task in gamma-ray astrophysics. It can be treated with rapidly-advancing machine learning algorithms, which have the potential to outperform traditional analysis methods. However, a major challenge for machine learning models is extracting reliably labelled training examples from real data. Citizen science offers a promising approach to tackle this challenge.

We present "Muon Hunter", a citizen science project hosted on the Zooniverse platform, where VERITAS data are classified multiple times by individual users in order to select and parameterize muon events, a product from cosmic ray induced showers. We use this dataset to train and validate a convolutional neural-network model to identify muon events for use in monitoring and calibration. The results of this work and our experience of using the Zooniverse are presented.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0826
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