  Upcoming Fast Radio Burst (FRB) surveys will search $\sim$10\,$^3$ beams on
sky with very high duty cycle, generating large numbers of single-pulse
candidates. The abundance of false positives presents an intractable problem if
candidates are to be inspected by eye, making it a good application for
artificial intelligence (AI). We apply deep learning to single pulse
classification and develop a hierarchical framework for ranking events by their
probability of being true astrophysical transients. We construct a tree-like
deep neural network (DNN) that takes multiple or individual data products as
input (e.g. dynamic spectra and multi-beam detection information) and trains on
them simultaneously. We have built training and test sets using false-positive
triggers from real telescopes, along with simulated FRBs, and single pulses
from pulsars. Training of the DNN was independently done for two radio
telescopes: the CHIME Pathfinder, and Apertif on Westerbork. High accuracy and
recall can be achieved with a labelled training set of a few thousand events.
Even with high triggering rates, classification can be done very quickly on
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). That speed is essential for selective
voltage dumps or issuing real-time VOEvents. Next, we investigate whether
dedispersion back-ends could be completely replaced by a real-time DNN
classifier. It is shown that a single forward propagation through a moderate
convolutional network could be faster than brute-force dedispersion; but the
low signal-to-noise per pixel makes such a classifier sub-optimal for this
problem. Real-time automated classification may prove useful for bright,
unexpected signals, both now and in the era of radio astronomy when data
volumes and the searchable parameter spaces further outgrow our ability to
manually inspect the data, such as for SKA and ngVLA.
