Rutgers University Department of Physics and Astronomy

Mariel Pettee
(Lawrence Berkeley National Lab / Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics)

Title: Weakly-Supervised Anomaly Detection in the Milky Way

Abstract: Classification Without Labels (CWoLa) is a weakly-supervised anomaly detection technique that leverages neural networks to identify cold stellar streams within the more than one billion Milky Way stars observed by the Gaia satellite. The CWoLa methodology operates without the use of labeled streams or knowledge of astrophysical principles. Instead, it uses a classifier to distinguish between mixed samples for which the proportions of signal and background samples are unknown. This computationally lightweight strategy is able to detect both simulated streams and the known stream GD-1 in data. Originally designed for high-energy collider physics, this technique may have broad applicability within astrophysics as well as other domains interested in identifying localized anomalies.

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