1. |
- Kessler, R., et al.
(author)
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Models and Simulations for the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC)
- 2019
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In: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. - : IOP Publishing. - 0004-6280 .- 1538-3873. ; 131:1003
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We describe the simulated data sample for the Photometric Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC), a publicly available challenge to classify transient and variable events that will be observed by the LSST, a new facility expected to start in the early 2020s. The challenge was hosted by Kaggle, ran from 2018 September 28 to December 17, and included 1094 teams competing for prizes. Here we provide details of the 18 transient and variable source models, which were not revealed until after the challenge, and release the model libraries at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2612896. We describe the LSST Operations Simulator used to predict realistic observing conditions, and we describe the publicly available SNANA simulation code used to transform the models into observed fluxes and uncertainties in the LSST passbands (ugrizy). Although PLAsTiCC has finished, the publicly available models and simulation tools are being used within the astronomy community to further improve classification, and to study contamination in photometrically identified samples of SN Ia used to measure properties of dark energy. Our simulation framework will continue serving as a platform to improve the PLAsTiCC models, and to develop new models.
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2. |
- Muthukrishna, Daniel, et al.
(author)
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RAPID : Early Classification of Explosive Transients Using Deep Learning
- 2019
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In: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. - : IOP Publishing. - 0004-6280 .- 1538-3873. ; 131:1005
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We present Real-time Automated Photometric IDentification (RAPID), a novel time series classification tool capable of automatically identifying transients from within a day of the initial alert, to the full lifetime of a light curve. Using a deep recurrent neural network with gated recurrent units (GRUs), we present the first method specifically designed to provide early classifications of astronomical timeseries data, typing 12 different transient classes. Our classifier can process light curves with any phase coverage, and it does not rely on deriving computationally expensive features from the data, making RAPID well suited for processing the millions of alerts that ongoing and upcoming wide-field surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will produce. The classification accuracy improves over the lifetime of the transient as more photometric data becomes available, and across the 12 transient classes, we obtain an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.95 and 0.98 at early and late epochs, respectively. We demonstrate RAPID's ability to effectively provide early classifications of observed transients from the ZTF data stream. We have made RAPID available as an open-source software package(8) for machine-learning-based alert brokers to use for the autonomous and quick classification of several thousand light curves within a few seconds.
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