Machine learning for light curves.

Currently focusing on broad classification of astronomical objects. Project in
hibernation as of May 2018. Like a bear.

Requirements

• Python 3
• SQLite command line tool (optional)

Local install

• Set LCML environment variable to repo checkout’s path
  (e.g., export LCML=/Users/*/code/light_curve_ml)
• cd $LCML && pip install -e . --user

AWS Ubuntu install

See instructions in conf/dev/ubuntu_install.txt

Running ML pipeline

Supervised and unsupervised machine learning pipelines are run via the
run_pipeline.py entry point. It expects the path to a job (config) file and
file name for logger output. For example:

python3 lcml/pipeline/run_pipeline.py --path conf/local/supervised/macho.json --logFileName super_macho.log

Job File

The pipeline expects a job file (macho.json in above example) specifying the
configuration of the pipeline and detailed declaration of experiment parameters.

The specified job file supercedes and overrides the default job file
(conf/common/pipeline.json) on a per field basis recursively. So any, or none,
of the default fields may be overridden. The default settings are located at
conf/common/pipeline.json.

Sections

Job files have the following structure:

• globalParams - Parameters used across multiple pipeline stages
• database - All db config and table names
• loadData - Stage coverting raw data into coherent light curves
• preprocessData - Stage cleaning and preprocessing light curves
• extractFeatures - Stage extracting features from cleaned light curves
• postprocessFeatures - Stage further processing extracted features
• modelSearch - Stage testing several ML models with differing hyperparameters
  • function - search function name
  • model - ML model spec including non-searched parameters
  • params - parameters controlling the model search
• serialization - Stage persisting ML model and metadata to disk

Pipeline ‘stages’ are customizable processors. Each stage definition has the
following components:

• skip - Boolean determining whether stage should execute
• params - stage-specific parameters
• writeTable - name of db table to which output is written

Example Jobs

Some representative job files provided in this repo include:

• local/supervised/fast_macho.json - Runs tiny portion of MACHO dataset
  through all supervised stages. Useful for pipeline debugging and for integration
  testing.
• local/supervised/macho.json - Full supervised learning pipeline for MACHO
  dataset. Uses feets library for feature extraction and random forests for
  classification.
• local/supervised/ogle3.json - Ditto for OGLE3
• local/unsupervised/macho.json - Unsupervised learning pipeline for MACHO
  focused on Mini-batch KMeans and Agglomerative clustering

Other Scripts

• lcml.data.acquisistion - Scripts used to acquire and/or process various
  datasets including MACHO, OGLE3, Catalina, and Gaia
• lcml.poc - One-off proof-of-concept scripts for various libaries

Logging Config

The LoggingManager class allows for convenient customization of Python Logger
objects. The default Logging config is specified conf/common/logging.json.
This config should contain the following main keys:

• basicConfig - values passed to logging.basicConfig
• handlers - handler definitions with a type attribute, which may be
  either stream or file
• modules - list of module specific logger level settings

Main modules should initialize the manager by invoking LoggingManager.initLogging
at the start of execution before logger objects have been created.