TJ-II wave forms analysis with wavelets and support vector machines

Since the fusion plasma experiment generates hundreds of signals, it is essential to have automatic mechanisms for searching similarities and retrieving of specific data in the wave form database. Wavelet transform (WT) is a transformation that allows one to map signals to spaces of lower dimensionality. Support vector machine (SVM) is a very effective method for general purpose pattern recognition. Given a set of input vectors which belong to two different classes, the SVM maps the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space through some nonlinear mapping, where an optimal separating hyperplane is constructed. In this work, the combined use of WT and SVM is proposed for searching and retrieving similar wave forms in the TJ-II database. In a first stage, plasma signals will be preprocessed by WT to reduce their dimensionality and to extract their main features. In the next stage, and using the smoothed signals produced by the WT, SVM will be applied to show up the efficiency of the proposed method to deal with the problem of sorting out thousands of fusion plasma signals. From observation of several experiments, our WT+SVM method is very viable, and the results seems promising. However, we have further work to do. We have to finish the development of a Matlab toolbox for WT+SVM processing and to include new relevant features in the SVM inputs to improve the technique. We have also to make a better preprocessing of the input signals and to study the performance of other generic and self custom kernels. To reach it, and since the preprocessing stages are very time consuming, we are going to study the viability of using DSPs, RPGAs or parallel programming techniques to reduce the execution time.