The Language of Stars
Channel: COSPAR2021 Workshops
Date: 02/02/2021

Authors: Anamaria Berea, Andres Munoz-Jaramillo

Abstract: NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is a research accelerator that brings together data scientists and space scientists to solve some of the most difficult space and planetary problems using AI. This project is a spin-off of one of the main challenges, that identified star spots in Kepler data. But in this spin-off project we are looking at applications of specific AI techniques (natural language processing - NLP) to time series (light curves) in order to identify both unique features and patterns in time series in general, and in light curves in particular. We both construct and derive informational building blocks that are characteristic to the light curves of the stars in a subset of Kepler data and we compare these methods to more traditional machine learning applications (clustering). We show how this new methodology, rooted in NLP, can be a good alternative for the analysis of light curves and potentially for identifying exoplanetary transit as unique "linguistic" features.