Variable star classification using multiview metric learning.

Comprehensive observations of variable stars can include time domain photometry in a multitude of filters, spectroscopy, estimates of colour (e.g. U-B), etc. When the objective is to classify variable stars, traditional machine learning techniques distill these various representations (or views) into a single feature vector and attempt to discriminate among desired categories. In this work, we propose an alternative approach that inherently leverages multiple views of the same variable star. Our multiview metric learning framework enables robust characterization of star categories by directly learning to discriminate in a multifaceted feature space, thus, eliminating the need to combine feature representations prior to fitting the machine learning model. We also demonstrate how to extend standard multiview learning, which employs multiple vectorized views, to the matrix-variate case which allows very novel variable star signature representations. The performance of our proposed methods is evaluated on the UCR Starlight and LINEAR data sets. Both the vector and matrix-variate versions of our multiview learning framework perform favourably – demonstrating the ability to discriminate variable star categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]