@article{4f3615d8a0e940a880f1313877b1ccb0,
title = "Results of the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC)",
abstract = "Next-generation surveys like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) will generate orders of magnitude more discoveries of transients and variable stars than previous surveys. To prepare for this data deluge, we developed the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC), a competition that aimed to catalyze the development of robust classifiers under LSST-like conditions of a nonrepresentative training set for a large photometric test set of imbalanced classes. Over 1000 teams participated in PLAsTiCC, which was hosted in the Kaggle data science competition platform between 2018 September 28 and 2018 December 17, ultimately identifying three winners in 2019 February. Participants produced classifiers employing a diverse set of machine-learning techniques including hybrid combinations and ensemble averages of a range of approaches, among them boosted decision trees, neural networks, and multilayer perceptrons. The strong performance of the top three classifiers on Type Ia supernovae and kilonovae represent a major improvement over the current state of the art within astronomy. This paper summarizes the most promising methods and evaluates their results in detail, highlighting future directions both for classifier development and simulation needs for a next-generation PLAsTiCC data set.",
author = "R. Hlo{\v z}ek and Malz, {A. I.} and Ponder, {K. A.} and M. Dai and G. Narayan and Ishida, {E. E.O.} and AllamJr, {T. A.} and A. Bahmanyar and X. Bi and R. Biswas and K. Boone and S. Chen and N. Du and A. Erdem and L. Galbany and A. Garreta and Jha, {S. W.} and Jones, {D. O.} and R. Kessler and M. Lin and J. Liu and M. Lochner and Mahabal, {A. A.} and Mandel, {K. S.} and P. Margolis and Mart{\'i}nez-Galarza, {J. R.} and McEwen, {J. D.} and D. Muthukrishna and Y. Nakatsuka and T. Noumi and T. Oya and Peiris, {H. V.} and Peters, {C. M.} and Puget, {J. F.} and Setzer, {C. N.} and Siddhartha and S. Stefanov and T. Xie and L. Yan and Yeh, {K. H.} and W. Zuo",
note = "The Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge data set generation relied on numerous members of the astronomical community to provide models of astronomical transients and variables. The Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge is made possible through an intercollaboration agreement between LSST\u2019s Dark Energy Science Collaboration and the Transient and Variable Stars Science Collaboration. These models are described in Kessler et al. (). The DESC acknowledges ongoing support from the Institut National de Physique Nucl\u00E9aire et de Physique des Particules in France; the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom; and the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the LSST Corporation in the United States. DESC uses resources of the IN2P3 Computing Center (CC-IN2P3\u2013Lyon/Villeurbanne\u2013France) funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; STFC DiRAC HPC Facilities, funded by UK BIS National E-infrastructure capital grants; and the UK particle physics grid, supported by the GridPP Collaboration. This work was performed in part under DOE Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. We are grateful to Federica Bianco and the staff at NYU for hosting the PLAsTiCC team meeting. The awards for the PLAsTiCC contest were generously supported by Kaggle. We thank the staff at Kaggle, particularly Elizabeth Park, Maggie Demkin, and Sohier Dane, for their help in making the contest a success. We thank all participants in PLAsTiCC. We thank Federica Bianco, Francisco F\u00F6rster Bur\u00F3n, Chad Schafer, and Melissa Graham for providing an internal review of this document for the DESC and TVS collaborations, and thank Seth Digel for comments on this draft. We thank the anonymous referee for the comments that greatly improved the manuscript. This work was supported by an LSST Corporation Enabling Science grant. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) toward this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the authors and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. UK authors acknowledge funding from the Science and Technology Funding Council. Canadian coauthors acknowledge support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The Dunlap Institute is funded through an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. The authors at the University of Toronto acknowledge that the land on which the University of Toronto is built is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, and most recently, the territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. They are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory. R. H. acknowledges support from CIFAR, and the Azrieli and Alfred. P. Sloan Foundations. A.I.M. acknowledges support during this work from the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A.I.M. is a member of the LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC) Frameworks team; LINCC Frameworks is supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, as part of the Virtual Institute of Astrophysics (VIA). K.A.P. acknowledges support from the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics; the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; and U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science under Contract No.DE-AC02-76SF00515. E.E.O.I. acknowledges support from CNRS 2017 MOMENTUM grant. L.G. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovac\u00EDon (MCIN), the Agencia Estatal de Investigac\u00EDon (AEI) 10.13039/501100011033, and the European Social Fund (ESF) \{"}Investing in your future\{"} under the 2019 Ram\u00F3n y Cajal program RYC2019-027683-I and the PID2020-115253GA-I00 HOSTFLOWS project, from Centro Superior de Investigaciones Cient\u00EDficas (CSIC) under the PIE project 20215AT016, and the program Unidad de Excelencia Mar\u00EDa de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M. J.R.M.G acknowledges funding from the Chandra Science Research project code 40716015HH4600, under a contract with NASA. D.O.J. acknowledges the support provided by NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51462.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. D.O.J. also acknowledges support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish grant PGC2018-095317-B-C21 within the European Funds for Regional Development (FEDER). C.N.S., R.B., and H.V.P. were partially supported by the research environment grant \u201CGravitational Radiation and Electromagnetic Astrophysical Transients (GREAT)\u201D funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) under Dnr 2016-06012. R.B. and H.V.P. were additionally supported by the research project grant \u201CUnderstanding the Dynamic Universe\u201D funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation under Dnr KAW 2018.0067. M.D. acknowledges support from the Horizon Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. At Rutgers University (M.D., S.W.J.), this research was supported by NSF award AST-1615455 and DOE award DE-SC0011636. A.G acknowledges ERC grant PCG- 336983, Basque Government grant IT974-16, and MINECO grant PID2019-107444GA-I00.",
year = "2023",
month = aug,
day = "1",
doi = "10.3847/1538-4365/accd6a",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "267",
journal = "Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series",
issn = "0067-0049",
publisher = "American Astronomical Society",
number = "2",
}