This week, I continued to work with my Artificial Neural Network. Specifically, I implemented a 3-hidden layer sigmoidal, gradient-descent supervised network, with 3 neurons in the final output layer, since I have introduced a new class, trucks. I have overcome my past data limitation, since I observed that there is a multitude of trucks that comes between 9 and 10 am, and thus I have observed a bunch of trucks after the fact (their seismic patterns are rather distinct, and thus there could prove to be a very large supply of this data - I have gathered data on the past 50 days so far, and have gathered 60+ truck patterns).

With 3 classes, the two-layer network converges in ~200 epochs, while the 3-layer network takes around ~1200 (and more time per iteration). Since the error gradients in the stochastic gradient descent are recursively calculated, the only real time limitation in the algorithm is just lots of multiplication of weight / input vectors, lots of computation of sigmoidal functions, and lots of data I/O (actually, since the sigmoidal function is technically an exponentiation to a decimal power and a division, I would be curious to know if theory or Matlab has any clever ways of computing this faster that can be easily implemented - I will look into this today). Thus, the networks take a long time to train. I'm currently looking at optimizing the number of layers / number of neurons, but this will be a background process for at least several days, if not the next week. In the greater scope of things, however, training time isn't really a problem, since the actual running of the algorithm requires only one pass through the network, and the network should be as well-trained as possible. However, due to the fact that I am only here until the end of August, it would be nice to speed things up.

As far as other classifications, I can simulate signals either by dropping the copper block from the Stacis experiment, or by applying transfer functions to general seismic noise. However, I would like more real data on noise sources, but the only other one plausible to LIGO that I can currently think of (cars don't show up very well) is the LA Metro. Perhaps I will take a day to clock trains as they come in (since the schedule is imprecise) and see if there is any visible seismic pattern.

I also, with the help of Yaakov, Jenne, and Den, now have three working, triangulated seismometers, which can now begin taking triangulation data (the rock tumblers are still working, so there should be opportunities to do this), both to find hot-spots as Rana suggested, and to measure the velocity and test out my algorithm, as Den suggested.