Avocado

Photometric Classification of Astronomical Transients and Variables With Biased Spectroscopic Samples

About

Avocado is a general photometric classification code that is designed to produce classifications of arbitrary astronomical transients and variable objects. This code is designed from the ground up to address the problem of biased spectroscopic samples. It does so by generating many lightcurves from each object in the original spectroscopic sample at a variety of redshifts and with many different observing conditions. The “augmented” samples of lightcurves that are generated are much more representative of the full datasets than the original spectroscopic samples.

Installation

Requirements

Avocado has been tested on Python 3.7. It is not compatible with Python 2. Avocado depends on the following packages:

  • astropy
  • george (available through the conda-forge channel on conda)
  • lightgbm
  • matplotlib
  • numpy
  • pandas
  • pytables (pytables on conda, tables on pip)
  • requests
  • scikit-learn
  • scipy
  • tqdm

We recommend using anaconda to set up a python environment with these packages and using the conda-forge channel.

Installation

Avocado can be downloaded from github using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/kboone/avocado.git

It can then be installed as follows:

cd avocado
python setup.py install

Along with installing the avocado module, this package also provides a set of scripts that can be used to process datasets on the command line for a variety of common tasks.

Usage

Avocado is designed to be a general purpose photometric classification code that can be used for different surveys with implementations of different classifiers. An example of how avocado can be applied to the PLAsTiCC dataset using a LightGBM classifier can be seen here.

Indices and tables