TY - JOUR
T1 - Lessons learned from the 1st Ariel Machine Learning Challenge: Correcting transiting exoplanet light curves for stellar spots
AU - Nikolaou, Nikolaos
AU - Waldmann, Ingo P
AU - Tsiaras, Angelos
AU - Morvan, Mario
AU - Edwards, Billy
AU - Yip, Kai Hou
AU - Thompson, Alexandra
AU - Tinetti, Giovanna
AU - Sarkar, Subhajit
AU - Dawson, James M
AU - Borisov, Vadim
AU - Kasneci, Gjergji
AU - Petković, Matej
AU - Stepišnik, Tomaž
AU - Al-Ubaidi, Tarek
AU - Bailey, Rachel Louise
AU - Granitzer, Michael
AU - Julka, Sahib
AU - Kern, Roman
AU - Ofner, Patrick
AU - Wagner, Stefan
AU - Heppe, Lukas
AU - Bunse, Mirko
AU - Morik, Katharina
AU - Simões, Luís F.
PY - 2023/1/17
Y1 - 2023/1/17
N2 - The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterization. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is identifying the effects of spots visually and correcting them manually or discarding the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The primary focus of the paper is to present in detail a diverse arsenal of methods for doing so. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency’s upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top five winning teams, provide their code, and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal pre-processing – deep neural networks and ensemble methods – or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance.
AB - The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterization. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is identifying the effects of spots visually and correcting them manually or discarding the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The primary focus of the paper is to present in detail a diverse arsenal of methods for doing so. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency’s upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top five winning teams, provide their code, and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal pre-processing – deep neural networks and ensemble methods – or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance.
U2 - 10.1093/rasti/rzad050
DO - 10.1093/rasti/rzad050
M3 - Article
SN - 2752-8200
VL - 2
SP - 695
EP - 709
JO - RAS Techniques and Instruments
JF - RAS Techniques and Instruments
IS - 1
ER -