Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks for Uncertainty-Aware Classification of Infrasound Events

Accurate classification of infrasound signals is essential for nuclear-test verification, natural-hazard warning, and geophysical monitoring. Conventional convolutional neural networks (CNN) applied to this task tend to overfit small, class-imbalanced datasets and cannot quantify predictive uncertainty. To address these limitations, we introduce a Bayesian CNN framework that treats network weights as probability distributions and performs inference by variational approximation. LeNet-5, AlexNet, and 4Conv3Fc network serve as baselines and are converted into Bayes LeNet-5, Bayes AlexNet, and Bayes 4Conv3Fc. The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) provides time–frequency spectrograms as model input. On a highly imbalanced dataset comprising nuclear tests, chemical explosions, volcanic eruptions, rocket launches, earthquakes, and lightning, Bayes 4Conv3Fc reaches an overall accuracy of 99.14% without any data augmentation. Relative to the deterministic baselines, precision, recall, and F1-score increase by up to 6.91, 7.12, and 7.20 percentage points, respectively, and Cohen’s Kappa coefficient by up to 8.86 percentage points. Against class-weighted cross-entropy, a standard imbalance-handling baseline, the Bayesian models yield consistently lower Brier scores, indicating that the gains stem from principled uncertainty modelling rather than loss re-weighting alone.. This study quantifies both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty in an infrasound signal classification model, and the calibration analysis validates that these uncertainty estimates are reliable, providing a basis for evaluating prediction reliability and diagnosing potential failure modes, thereby contributing to improved model interpretability. Coupled with an event-level data partitioning strategy, the evaluation faithfully reflects the model’s generalization to unseen events and offers a promising direction toward uncertainty-aware infrasound monitoring.