Supervised Machine Learning for Refractive Index Structure Parameter Modeling

Abstract

The Hellenic Naval Academy (HNA) reports the latest results from a medium-range, near-maritime, free-space laser-communications-testing facility, between the lighthouse of Psitalia Island and the academy’s laboratory building. The FSO link is established within the premises of Piraeus port, with a path length of 2958 m and an average altitude of 35 m, mainly above water. Recently, the facility was upgraded through the addition of a BLS450 scintillometer, which is co-located with the MRV TS5000/155 FSO system and a WS-2000 weather station. This paper presents the preliminary optical turbulence measurements, collected from 24 to 31 of May 2022, alongside the macroscopic meteorological parameters. Four machine-learning algorithms (random forest (RF), gradient boosting regressor (GBR), single layer (ANN), and deep neural network (DNN)) were utilized for refractive-index-structural-parameter regression modeling. Additionally, another DNN was used to classify the strength level of the optical turbulence, as either strong or weak. The results showed very good prediction accuracy for all the models. Specifically, the ANN algorithm resulted in an R-squared of 0.896 and a mean square error (MSE) of 0.0834; the RF algorithm also gave a highly acceptable R-squared of 0.865 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.241. The Gradient Boosting Regressor (GBR) resulted in an R-squared of 0.851 and a RMSE of 0.252 and, finally, the DNN algorithm resulted in an R-squared of 0.79 and a RMSE of 0.088. The DNN-turbulence-strength-classification model exhibited a very acceptable classification performance, given the highly variability of our target value (Cn2), since we observed a predictive accuracy of 87% with the model.