The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (Jan 2024)
The ZTF Source Classification Project. III. A Catalog of Variable Sources
- Brian F. Healy,
- Michael W. Coughlin,
- Ashish A. Mahabal,
- Theophile Jegou du Laz,
- Andrew Drake,
- Matthew J. Graham,
- Lynne A. Hillenbrand,
- Jan van Roestel,
- Paula Szkody,
- LeighAnna Zielske,
- Mohammed Guiga,
- Muhammad Yusuf Hassan,
- Jill L. Hughes,
- Guy Nir,
- Saagar Parikh,
- Sungmin Park,
- Palak Purohit,
- Umaa Rebbapragada,
- Draco Reed,
- Daniel Warshofsky,
- Avery Wold,
- Joshua S. Bloom,
- Frank J. Masci,
- Reed Riddle,
- Roger Smith
Affiliations
- Brian F. Healy
- ORCiD
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Michael W. Coughlin
- ORCiD
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Ashish A. Mahabal
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics , Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Center for Data Driven Discovery , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Theophile Jegou du Laz
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics , Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Andrew Drake
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics , Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Matthew J. Graham
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics , Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Lynne A. Hillenbrand
- Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Jan van Roestel
- ORCiD
- Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam , 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Paula Szkody
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of Washington , Seattle, WA 98195, USA
- LeighAnna Zielske
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; Department of Physics, Pacific Lutheran University , Tacoma, WA 98447, USA
- Mohammed Guiga
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Muhammad Yusuf Hassan
- Division of Physics , Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar , Gujarat 382055, India
- Jill L. Hughes
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Guy Nir
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of California , Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , 1 Cyclotron Road, MS 50B-4206, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
- Saagar Parikh
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University , Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Computer Vision, Imaging and Graphics Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar , Gujarat 382055, India
- Sungmin Park
- School of Statistics, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Palak Purohit
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar , Gujarat 382055, India; Division of Engineering and Applied Science , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Umaa Rebbapragada
- ORCiD
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Draco Reed
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Daniel Warshofsky
- School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota , Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
- Avery Wold
- ORCiD
- IPAC, California Institute of Technology , 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Joshua S. Bloom
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of California , Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , 1 Cyclotron Road, MS 50B-4206, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
- Frank J. Masci
- ORCiD
- IPAC, California Institute of Technology , 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Reed Riddle
- ORCiD
- Caltech Optical Observatories , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Roger Smith
- ORCiD
- Caltech Optical Observatories , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/ad33c6
- Journal volume & issue
-
Vol. 272,
no. 1
p. 14
Abstract
The classification of variable objects provides insight into a wide variety of astrophysics ranging from stellar interiors to galactic nuclei. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) provides time-series observations that record the variability of more than a billion sources. The scale of these data necessitates automated approaches to make a thorough analysis. Building on previous work, this paper reports the results of the ZTF Source Classification Project ( SCoPe ), which trains neural network and XGBoost (XGB) machine-learning (ML) algorithms to perform dichotomous classification of variable ZTF sources using a manually constructed training set containing 170,632 light curves. We find that several classifiers achieve high precision and recall scores, suggesting the reliability of their predictions for 209,991,147 light curves across 77 ZTF fields. We also identify the most important features for XGB classification and compare the performance of the two ML algorithms, finding a pattern of higher precision among XGB classifiers. The resulting classification catalog is available to the public, and the software developed for SCoPe is open source and adaptable to future time-domain surveys.
Keywords
