Tuesday, July 9, 2013

1307.2209 (Matthew J. Graham et al.)

A comparison of period finding algorithms    [PDF]

Matthew J. Graham, Andrew J. Drake, S. G. Djorgovski, Ashish A. Mahabal, Ciro Donalek, Victor Duan, Alison Maher
This paper presents a comparison of popular period finding algorithms applied to the light curves of variable stars from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS), MACHO and ASAS data sets. We analyze the accuracy of the methods against magnitude, sampling rates, quoted period, quality measures (signal-to-noise and number of observations), variability, and object classes. We find that measure of dispersion-based techniques - analysis-of-variance with harmonics and conditional entropy - consistently give the best results but there are clear dependencies on object class and light curve quality. Period aliasing and identifying a period harmonic also remain significant issues. We consider the performance of the algorithms and show that a new conditional entropy-based algorithm is the most optimal in terms of completeness and speed. We also consider a simple ensemble approach and find that it performs no better than individual algorithms.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.2209

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