Classifying Kepler light curves for 12,000 A and F stars using supervised feature-based machine learning [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03020


With the availability of large-scale surveys like Kepler and TESS, there is a pressing need for automated methods to classify light curves according to known classes of variable stars. We introduce a new algorithm for classifying light curves that compares 7000 time-series features to find those which most effectively classify a given set of light curves. We apply our method to Kepler light curves for stars with effective temperatures in the range 6500–10,000K. We show that the sample can be meaningfully represented in an interpretable five-dimensional feature space that separates seven major classes of light curves (delta Scuti stars, gamma Doradus stars, RR Lyrae stars, rotational variables, contact eclipsing binaries, detached eclipsing binaries, and non-variables). We achieve a balanced classification accuracy of 82% on an independent test set of Kepler stars using a Gaussian mixture model classifier. We use our method to classify 12,000 Kepler light curves from Quarter 9 and provide a catalogue of the results. We further outline a confidence heuristic based on probability density with which to search our catalogue, and extract candidate lists of correctly-classified variable stars.

Read this paper on arXiv…

N. Barbara, T. Bedding, B. Fulcher, et. al.
Mon, 9 May 22
19/63

Comments: submitted to MNRAS (revised after first referee’s report)