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Main Authors: Blanchard, Jeremie, Casino, Lisa, Gierschendorf, Jordan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08940
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author Blanchard, Jeremie
Casino, Lisa
Gierschendorf, Jordan
author_facet Blanchard, Jeremie
Casino, Lisa
Gierschendorf, Jordan
contents The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres through spectral analysis is a complex challenge. The NeurIPS 2024 Ariel Data Challenge, in collaboration with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Ariel mission, provided an opportunity to explore machine learning techniques for extracting atmospheric compositions from simulated spectral data. In this work, we focus on a data-centric business approach, prioritizing generalization over competition-specific optimization. We briefly outline multiple experimental axes, including feature extraction, signal transformation, and heteroskedastic uncertainty modeling. Our experiments demonstrate that uncertainty estimation plays a crucial role in the Gaussian Log-Likelihood (GLL) score, impacting performance by several percentage points. Despite improving the GLL score by 11%, our results highlight the inherent limitations of tabular modeling and feature engineering for this task, as well as the constraints of a business-driven approach within a Kaggle-style competition framework. Our findings emphasize the trade-offs between model simplicity, interpretability, and generalization in astrophysical data analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08940
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NeurIPS 2024 Ariel Data Challenge: Characterisation of Exoplanetary Atmospheres Using a Data-Centric Approach
Blanchard, Jeremie
Casino, Lisa
Gierschendorf, Jordan
Machine Learning
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres through spectral analysis is a complex challenge. The NeurIPS 2024 Ariel Data Challenge, in collaboration with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Ariel mission, provided an opportunity to explore machine learning techniques for extracting atmospheric compositions from simulated spectral data. In this work, we focus on a data-centric business approach, prioritizing generalization over competition-specific optimization. We briefly outline multiple experimental axes, including feature extraction, signal transformation, and heteroskedastic uncertainty modeling. Our experiments demonstrate that uncertainty estimation plays a crucial role in the Gaussian Log-Likelihood (GLL) score, impacting performance by several percentage points. Despite improving the GLL score by 11%, our results highlight the inherent limitations of tabular modeling and feature engineering for this task, as well as the constraints of a business-driven approach within a Kaggle-style competition framework. Our findings emphasize the trade-offs between model simplicity, interpretability, and generalization in astrophysical data analysis.
title NeurIPS 2024 Ariel Data Challenge: Characterisation of Exoplanetary Atmospheres Using a Data-Centric Approach
topic Machine Learning
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08940