event
Thursday 08 Oct 2015: Modelling Light Curves for Improved Classification of Astronomical Objects
Professor Julian Faraway - Bath University
H101 14:30-16:30
Many synoptic surveys are observing large parts of the sky multiple
times. The resulting lightcurves provide a window to the
dynamic nature of the universe. However, there are many significant
challenges in analyzing these lightcurves. We describe a
modeling-based approach using Gaussian process regression for
generating critical measures for the classification of such
lightcurves. This method has key advantages over other popular
nonparametric regression methods in its ability to deal with
censoring, a mixture of sparsely and densely sampled curves, the
presence of annual gaps caused by objects not being visible
throughout the year from a given position on Earth and known but
variable measurement errors.
