Flares are an important solar phenomenon that have real impacts on Earth and in our local space, they can disrupt observations/communications, damage instruments and in extreme cases damage power infrastructures.
The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system (GOES) has been providing high-cadence surface-integral X-ray light curves for over 40 years, giving us a valuable resource for the detection and classification of solar flare events.
This work evaluates the use of various algorithms currently used in solar flare detection including those by D. F. Ryan et al. (2016) and S L Freeland et al. (2012) and evaluate these for sensitivity and specificity while looking at algorithms used in other branches of science.
Further, evaluation is made of the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and Template based peak detection commonly used in peak detection in the field of mass spectrometry.
The comparison of all these methods is made with a special consideration to parameter selection and selection bias involved in each, including the pre-processing steps involved.