A Package for the Automated Classification of Periodic Variable Stars

We present a machine learning package for the classification of periodic variable stars. Our package is intended to be general: it can classify any single band optical light curve comprising at least a few tens of observations covering durations from weeks to years, with arbitrary time sampling. We use light curves of periodic variable stars taken from OGLE and EROS-2 to train the model. To make our classifier relatively survey-independent, it is trained on 16 features extracted from the light curves (e.g. period, skewness, Fourier amplitude ratio). The model classifies light curves into one of seven superclasses - Delta Scuti, RR Lyrae, Cepheid, Type II Cepheid, eclipsing binary, long-period variable, non-variable - as well as subclasses of these, such as ab, c, d, and e types for RR Lyraes. When trained to give only superclasses, our model achieves 0.98 for both recall and precision as measured on an independent validation dataset (on a scale of 0 to 1). When trained to give subclasses, it achieves 0.81 for both recall and precision. In order to assess classification performance of the subclass model, we applied it to the MACHO, LINEAR, and ASAS periodic variables, which gave recall/precision of 0.92/0.98, 0.89/0.96, and 0.84/0.88, respectively. We also applied the subclass model to Hipparcos periodic variable stars of many other variability types that do not exist in our training set, in order to examine how much those types degrade the classification performance of our target classes. In addition, we investigate how the performance varies with the number of data points and duration of observations. We find that recall and precision do not vary significantly if the number of data points is larger than 80 and the duration is more than a few weeks. The classifier software of the subclass model is available from the GitHub repository (https://goo.gl/xmFO6Q).Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Inventive Process as a Recombinant Search over Complex Landscape: Evidence from the Disk Drive Industry

Invention, Recombinant search, Complexity, NK Model, Simulation, Interdependence

Dimension Reduction by Mutual Information Discriminant Analysis

In the past few decades, researchers have proposed many discriminant analysis (DA) algorithms for the study of high-dimensional data in a variety of problems. Most DA algorithms for feature extraction are based on transformations that simultaneously maximize the between-class scatter and minimize the withinclass scatter matrices. This paper presents a novel DA algorithm for feature extraction using mutual information (MI). However, it is not always easy to obtain an accurate estimation for high-dimensional MI. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for feature extraction that is based on one-dimensional MI estimations. We will refer to this algorithm as mutual information discriminant analysis (MIDA). The performance of this proposed method was evaluated using UCI databases. The results indicate that MIDA provides robust performance over different data sets with different characteristics and that MIDA always performs better than, or at least comparable to, the best performing algorithms.Comment: 13pages, 3 tables, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Application

Bott Periodicity and Realizations of Chiral Symmetry in Arbitrary Dimensions

We compute the chiral symmetries of the Lagrangian for confining "vector-like" gauge theories with massless fermions in $d$-dimensional Minkowski space and, under a few reasonable assumptions, determine the form of the quadratic fermion condensates which arise through spontaneous breaking of these symmetries. We find that for each type (complex, real, or pseudoreal) of representation of the gauge group carried by the fermions, the chiral symmetries of the Lagrangian, as well as the residual symmetries after dynamical breaking, exactly follow the pattern of Bott periodicity as the dimension changes. The consequences of this for the topological features of the low-energy effective theory are considered.Comment: v2: Small additions and clarifications. To appear in Physics Letters