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A recurrent neural network for classification of unevenly sampled variable stars

Nature Astronomy volume 2, pages 151–155 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Astronomical surveys of celestial sources produce streams of noisy time series measuring flux versus time (‘light curves’). Unlike in many other physical domains, however, large (and source-specific) temporal gaps in data arise naturally due to intranight cadence choices as well as diurnal and seasonal constraints1,2,3,4,5. With nightly observations of millions of variable stars and transients from upcoming surveys4,6, efficient and accurate discovery and classification techniques on noisy, irregularly sampled data must be employed with minimal human-in-the-loop involvement. Machine learning for inference tasks on such data traditionally requires the laborious hand-coding of domain-specific numerical summaries of raw data (‘features’)7. Here, we present a novel unsupervised autoencoding recurrent neural network8 that makes explicit use of sampling times and known heteroskedastic noise properties. When trained on optical variable star catalogues, this network produces supervised classification models that rival other best-in-class approaches. We find that autoencoded features learned in one time-domain survey perform nearly as well when applied to another survey. These networks can continue to learn from new unlabelled observations and may be used in other unsupervised tasks, such as forecasting and anomaly detection.

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Fig. 1: Diagram of an RNN encoder–decoder architecture for irregularly sampled time series data.
Fig. 2: Example autoencoder reconstructions of ASAS light curves from 64-dimensional feature representation.
Fig. 3: Confusion matrices for autoencoder-feature random forest classifiers for labelled variable star light curves for each survey.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. LeCun and F. El Gabaly for helpful discussions and A. Culich for computational assistance. This work is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery and National Science Foundation BIGDATA grant number 1251274. Computation was provided by the Pacific Research Platform programme through the National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (number 1541349), Office of Cyberinfrastructure (number 1246396), University of California Office of the President, Calit2 and Berkeley Research Computing at University of California Berkeley.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Brett Naul & Joshua S. Bloom

  2. Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Fernando Pérez

  3. Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Fernando Pérez & Stéfan van der Walt

  4. Department of Data Science and Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Fernando Pérez

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  1. Brett Naul
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  2. Joshua S. Bloom
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  4. Stéfan van der Walt
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Contributions

B.N. implemented and trained the networks, assembled the machine learning results and generated the first drafts of the paper and figures. J.S.B. conceived of the project, assembled the astronomical light curves and oversaw the supervised training portions. F.P. provided theoretical input. S.v.d.W. discussed the results and commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Brett Naul.

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Supplementary Text, Supplementary Figures 1–11 and Supplementary References

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Naul, B., Bloom, J.S., Pérez, F. et al. A recurrent neural network for classification of unevenly sampled variable stars. Nat Astron 2, 151–155 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0321-z

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