Papers › The effect of phased recurrent units in the classification of multiple catalogs of...

The effect of phased recurrent units in the classification of multiple catalogs of astronomical lightcurves

7 Jun 2021arXiv:2106.03736archive 2025-07-28

C. Donoso-Oliva, G. Cabrera-Vives, P. Protopapas, R. Carrasco-Davis, P. A. Estevez

In the new era of very large telescopes, where data is crucial to expand scientific knowledge, we have witnessed many deep learning applications for the automatic classification of lightcurves. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are one of the models used for these applications, and the LSTM unit stands out for being an excellent choice for the representation of long time series. In general, RNNs assume observations at discrete times, which may not suit the irregular sampling of lightcurves. A traditional technique to address irregular sequences consists of adding the sampling time to the network's input, but this is not guaranteed to capture sampling irregularities during training. Alternatively, the Phased LSTM unit has been created to address this problem by updating its state using the sampling times explicitly. In this work, we study the effectiveness of the LSTM and Phased LSTM based architectures for the classification of astronomical lightcurves. We use seven catalogs containing periodic and nonperiodic astronomical objects. Our findings show that LSTM outperformed PLSTM on 6/7 datasets. However, the combination of both units enhances the results in all datasets.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

cridonoso/plstm_tf2 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfnot reachable when probed 2026-09-17 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Time SeriesTime Series Analysis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections