Rejecting noise in Baikal-GVD data with neural networks

Abstract

Abstract Baikal-GVD is a large (∼ 1 km3) underwater neutrino telescope installed in the fresh waters of Lake Baikal. The deep lake water environment is pervaded by background light, which is detectable by Baikal-GVD's photosensors. We introduce a neural network for an efficient separation of these noise hits from the signal ones, stemmng from the propagation of relativistic particles through the detector. The model has a U-Net-like architecture and employs temporal (causal) structure of events. The neural network's metrics reach up to 99% signal purity (precision) and 96% survival efficiency (recall) on Monte-Carlo simulated dataset. We compare the developed method with the algorithmic approach to rejecting the noise and discuss other possible architectures of neural networks, including graph-based ones.