[HN Gopher] New planets confirmed in machine learning first
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       New planets confirmed in machine learning first
        
       Author : dnetesn
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2020-08-26 10:55 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (phys.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
        
       | antognini wrote:
       | To be clear, there have been prior studies which have discovered
       | exoplanets with machine learning. One example (cited in this
       | paper) was from Chris Shallue at Google and Andrew Vanderberg at
       | CfA, who discovered the first eight planet system in 2017 by
       | training convolutional neural networks on light curve data. [1]
       | 
       | The authors explain their contribution to be:
       | 
       | > To date these [previous studies] have all focused on
       | identifying [false positives] or ranking candidates within a
       | survey. We build on past work by focusing on separating true
       | planets from [false positives], rather than just planetary
       | candidates, and in doing so probabilistically to allow planet
       | validation.
       | 
       | To translate, these previous studies focused on identifying
       | exoplanet _candidates_. In the early days of exoplanet research,
       | these candidates were then followed up with more detailed
       | observations to confirm that the candidate was a true planet.
       | 
       | With the advent of Kepler, there are now way too many candidates
       | to get follow-up observations on all of them. So now exoplanets
       | are "validated" by calculating the probability of a false
       | positive. I am not in this field, but it seems that the most
       | common algorithm to do this is called VESPA [2]. The contribution
       | these authors make is to use a machine learning system for the
       | _validation_ process, i.e., calculating the probability that the
       | candidate is a false positive.
       | 
       | [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05044
       | 
       | [2]: https://github.com/timothydmorton/VESPA
        
       | arkanciscan wrote:
       | *exoplanets
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | I was hoping for Planet 9, 10 & 11.
        
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       (page generated 2020-08-26 23:01 UTC)