Title
An Information Theoretic Algorithm for Finding Periodicities in Stellar Light Curves
Abstract
We propose a new information theoretic metric for finding periodicities in stellar light curves. Light curves are astronomical time series of brightness over time, and are characterized as being noisy and unevenly sampled. The proposed metric combines correntropy (generalized correlation) with a periodic kernel to measure similarity among samples separated by a given period. The new metric provides a periodogram, called Correntropy Kernelized Periodogram (CKP), whose peaks are associated with the fundamental frequencies present in the data. The CKP does not require any resampling, slotting or folding scheme as it is computed directly from the available samples. CKP is the main part of a fully-automated pipeline for periodic light curve discrimination to be used in astronomical survey databases. We show that the CKP method outperformed the slotted correntropy, and conventional methods used in astronomy for periodicity discrimination and period estimation tasks, using a set of light curves drawn from the MACHO survey. The proposed metric achieved 97.2% of true positives with 0% of false positives at the confidence level of 99% for the periodicity discrimination task; and 88% of hits with 11.6% of multiples and 0.4% of misses in the period estimation task.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/TSP.2012.2204260
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
correlation,estimation,variable stars,noise,astronomical surveys,information theory,kernel,measurement,time series analysis
Journal
60
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 60, issue 10, pp. 5135-5145, October 2012
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.04
2
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pablo Huijse1103.54
Pablo A. Estévez237236.29
Pavlos Protopapas312714.73
Pablo Zegers4356.32
José Carlos Príncipe5841102.43