CLARE: Classification-based Regression for Electron Temperature Prediction

arXiv:2603.12470v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Electron temperature (Te) is an important parameter governing space weather in the upper atmosphere, but has historically been underexplored in the space weather machine learning literature. We present CLARE, a machine learning model for predicting electron temperature in the Earth’s plasmasphere trained on AKEBONO (EXOS-D) satellite measurements as well as solar and geomagnetic indices. CLARE uses a classification-based regression architecture that transforms the continuous Te output space into 150 discrete classification intervals. Training the model on a classification task improves prediction accuracy by 6.46% relative compared to a traditional regression model while also outputting uncertainty estimation information on its predictions. On a held out test set from the AKEBONO data, the model’s Te predictions achieve 69.67% accuracy within 10% of the ground truth and 46.17% on a known geomagnetic storm period from January 30th to February 7th, 1991. We show that machine learning can be used to produce high-accuracy Te models on publicly available data.