Harnessing ontology and machine learning for RSO classification

Classification is an important part of resident space objects (RSOs) identification, which is a main focus of space situational awareness. Owing to the absence of some features caused by the limited and uncertain observations, RSO classification remains a difficult task. In this paper, an ontology for RSO classification named OntoStar is built upon domain knowledge and machine learning rules. Then data describing RSO are represented by OntoStar. A demo shows how an RSO is classified based on OntoStar. It is also shown in the demo that traceable and comprehensible reasons for the classification can be given, hence the classification can be checked and validated. Experiments on WEKA show that ontology based classification gains a relatively high accuracy and precision for classifying RSOs. When classifying RSOs with imperfect data, ontology-based classification keeps its performances, showing evident advantages over classical machine learning classifiers who either have increases of 5 % at least in FP rate or have decreases of 5 % at least in indexes such as accuracy, precision and recall.