The development of synoptic sky surveys has led to a massive amount of data
for which resources needed for analysis are beyond human capabilities. To
process this information and to extract all possible knowledge, machine
learning techniques become necessary. Here we present a new method to
automatically discover unknown variable objects in large astronomical catalogs.
With the aim of taking full advantage of all the information we have about
known objects, our method is based on a supervised algorithm. In particular, we
train a random forest classifier using known variability classes of objects and
obtain votes for each of the objects in the training set. We then model this
voting distribution with a Bayesian network and obtain the joint voting
distribution among the training objects. Consequently, an unknown object is
considered as an outlier insofar it has a low joint probability. Our method is
suitable for exploring massive datasets given that the training process is
performed offline. We tested our algorithm on 20 millions light-curves from the
MACHO catalog and generated a list of anomalous candidates. We divided the
candidates into two main classes of outliers: artifacts and intrinsic outliers.
Artifacts were principally due to air mass variation, seasonal variation, bad
calibration or instrumental errors and were consequently removed from our
outlier list and added to the training set. After retraining, we selected about
4000 objects, which we passed to a post analysis stage by perfoming a
cross-match with all publicly available catalogs. Within these candidates we
identified certain known but rare objects such as eclipsing Cepheids, blue
variables, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources. For some outliers there
were no additional information. Among them we identified three unknown
variability types and few individual outliers that will be followed up for a
deeper analysis.Comment: 16 pages, 18 figures, published in The Astrophysical Journa
