A self-organised partition of the high dimensional plasma parameter space for plasma disruption prediction

Abstract

This paper introduces a disruption predictor constructed through a fully unsupervised two-dimensional mapping of the high-dimensional JET operational space. The primary strength of this disruption predictor lies in its inherent self-organization capability. Diverging from both supervised disruption predictors and earlier approaches suggested by the same authors, which were based on unsupervised models such as Self-Organizing or Generative Topographic Maps, this predictor eliminates the need for labeling data of disruption terminated pulses during training. In prior methods, labels were indeed required post-mapping to inform the model about the presence or absence of disruption precursors at each time instant during the disrupted discharges. In contrast, our approach in this study involves no labeling of data from disruption-terminated experiments. The Self-Organizing Map, operating without any a priori information, adeptly identifies the regions characterizing the pre-disruptive phase. Moreover, SOM discovers non-trivial relationships and captures the complicated interplay of device diagnostics on the internal plasma states from the experimental data. The provided model is highly interpretable; it allows the visualization of high-dimensional data and facilitates easy interrogation of the model to understand the reasons behind its correlations. Hence, utilizing SOMs across various devices can prove invaluable in extracting rules and identifying common patterns, thereby facilitating extrapolation to ITER of the knowledge acquired from existing tokamaks.