Volume 514 - High Energy Astrophysics in Southern Africa 2025 (HEASA2025) - GRBs, FRBs and other Transients
Investigating machine learning approaches for differentiating MGFs and SGRBs
D.J. Maheso* and S. Razzaque
*: corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: December 01, 2025
Published on:
Abstract
Magnetar giant flares (MGFs) and short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) are short gamma-ray transients (SGRTs) with overlapping temporal and spectral characteristics, making them challenging to distinguish, especially when their redshift is unknown. In this study, we apply supervised machine learning using a Support Vector Machine to classify MGFs and SGRBs. Temporal parameters (including pulse rise times from Norris function fits) and spectral features (derived from Comptonized model fits over the 10 keV-40 MeV range) are extracted as input features for classification. We analyse 15 MGF and 101 SGRB samples from 10 Fermi-GBM sources. Classifier performance is assessed using leave-one-source-out cross-validation. The model successfully classifies most SGRBs, but struggles with MGFs due to limited training data and significant feature overlap. This work highlights the potential and challenges of incorporating machine learning into the automated classification of these SGRTs.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.514.0043
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in article format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in proceeding format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.