Graph-Based Light-Curve Features for Robust Transient Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Petro-Ramos, Jesús D., Ruiz-Morales, David J., Sierra-Porta, D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Petro-Ramos, Jesús D.
Ruiz-Morales, David J.
Sierra-Porta, D.
author_facet Petro-Ramos, Jesús D.
Ruiz-Morales, David J.
Sierra-Porta, D.
contents We investigate graph-based representations of astronomical light curves for transient classification on a quality-controlled, class-balanced subset of the MANTRA benchmark (minimum coverage N_min=100 epochs; N=1705 objects after filtering and Non-Tr. subsampling). Each series is mapped to three visibility-graph views -- horizontal (HVG), directed (DHVG), and weighted (W-HVG) -- from which we extract compact, length-aware network descriptors (degree/strength moments, clustering and motifs, assortativity, path/efficiency, and spectral summaries). Using object-level stratified five-fold validation and tree-based learners, the best configuration (LightGBM with HVG+DHVG+W-HVG features) attains a macro-F1 of 0.622 +/- 0.010 and accuracy of 0.661 +/- 0.010 on this subset. For context, the published MANTRA baseline reports F1_macro=0.528 on the full dataset; because class priors differ after quality control, this reference is not a like-for-like comparison. Ablations show that weighted contrasts and directed asymmetry contribute complementary gains to undirected topology. Per-class analysis highlights strong performance for CV, HPM, and Non-Tr., with residual confusions concentrated in the AGN-Blazar-SN block. These results indicate that visibility graphs offer a simple, survey-agnostic bridge between irregular photometric time series and standard classifiers, yielding competitive multiclass performance without bespoke deep architectures. We release code and feature definitions, together with the list of object IDs used in the evaluation subset, to facilitate reproducibility and future extensions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph-Based Light-Curve Features for Robust Transient Classification
Petro-Ramos, Jesús D.
Ruiz-Morales, David J.
Sierra-Porta, D.
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
We investigate graph-based representations of astronomical light curves for transient classification on a quality-controlled, class-balanced subset of the MANTRA benchmark (minimum coverage N_min=100 epochs; N=1705 objects after filtering and Non-Tr. subsampling). Each series is mapped to three visibility-graph views -- horizontal (HVG), directed (DHVG), and weighted (W-HVG) -- from which we extract compact, length-aware network descriptors (degree/strength moments, clustering and motifs, assortativity, path/efficiency, and spectral summaries). Using object-level stratified five-fold validation and tree-based learners, the best configuration (LightGBM with HVG+DHVG+W-HVG features) attains a macro-F1 of 0.622 +/- 0.010 and accuracy of 0.661 +/- 0.010 on this subset. For context, the published MANTRA baseline reports F1_macro=0.528 on the full dataset; because class priors differ after quality control, this reference is not a like-for-like comparison. Ablations show that weighted contrasts and directed asymmetry contribute complementary gains to undirected topology. Per-class analysis highlights strong performance for CV, HPM, and Non-Tr., with residual confusions concentrated in the AGN-Blazar-SN block. These results indicate that visibility graphs offer a simple, survey-agnostic bridge between irregular photometric time series and standard classifiers, yielding competitive multiclass performance without bespoke deep architectures. We release code and feature definitions, together with the list of object IDs used in the evaluation subset, to facilitate reproducibility and future extensions.
title Graph-Based Light-Curve Features for Robust Transient Classification
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17721