Determining Patterns from Radiation Portal Monitor Data: Enabling Data Insight with Visual and Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Smuggling of nuclear and radiological material is a complex problem that will need to be analyzed from a variety of angles in order to effectively combat something so rare, yet so hazardous. One crucial tool in the effort to detect and deter smuggling of rad/nuc materials is the radiation portal monitor (RPM)—machines that scan passengers at airports, vehicles and trains at border crossings, and shipping containers at ports throughout the world. While data from RPMs are regularly analyzed at the individual lane level to ensure monitor health and good operation, aggregate analysis of the data has not gone far beyond summary statistics such as number of occupancies and alarm rates. In particular, there are opportunities to carry out interactive exploratory data analysis with the help of tools like the R package Shiny and methods that lend themselves to the visual display of spatiotemporal correlations such as spatial PCA and detrended cross-correlation analysis. By doing so, we discover interesting spatiotemporal patterns in the data that point to specific events or anomalous moments in time that warrant further analysis.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security; USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1467231
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-18-27721
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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