ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction

Predicting solar flares is a challenging space-weather forecasting problem with potentially significant impacts on Earth's upper atmosphere, including disruptions to radio communications. We propose Active Region attENtion Aggregation~(ARENA), a neural network architecture that predicts solar flares from a variable number of active-region cutouts while learning to identify the region most relevant to the prediction. ARENA is trained using multiple-instance learning under weak supervision, requiring only a flare/no-flare label for the observation and no labels specifying the flare origin. The learned attention mechanism therefore provides a means of localizing the active region driving the prediction without explicit origin annotations. ARENA achieves a heidke skill score of 0.45 which is comparable to other flare prediction approaches. These results demonstrate that active-region-based aggregation can provide an efficient and interpretable approach to solar flare prediction.