The publication about Gamma-Hadron-Separation in the MAGIC Experiment by Tobias Voigt, Roland Fried, Michael Backes and Wolfgang Rhode (SFB-project C3) has been granted with the Best Application Paper Award at the 36^th annual conference of the GfKI (German Classification Society).

Abstract

The MAGIC-telescopes on the canary island of La Palma are two of the largest Cherenkov telescopes in the world, operating in stereoscopic mode since 2009. A major step in the analysis of MAGIC data is the classification of observations into a gamma-ray signal and hadronic background.
In this contribution we introduce the data which is provided by the MAGIC telescopes, which has some distinctive features. These features include high class imbalance and unknown and unequal misclassification costs as well as the absence of reliably labeled training data. We introduce a method to deal with some of these features. The method is based on a thresholding approach and aims at minimization of the mean square error of an estimator, which is derived from the classification. The method is designed to fit into the special requirements of the MAGIC data.