Periodicity detection in AGN with the boosted tree method

Abstract

We apply a machine learning algorithm called XGBoost to explore the periodicity of two radio sources: PKS~1921-293 (OV~236) and PKS~2200+420 (BL~Lac), both radio frequency dataset obtained from University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory (UMRAO), at 4.8 GHz, 8.0 GHz, and 14.5 GHz, between 1969 to 2012. From this methods, we find that the XGBoost provides the opportunity to use a machine learning based methodology on radio dataset and to extract information with strategies quite different from those traditionally used to treat time series and to obtain periodicity through the classification of recurrent events. The results were compared with other methods from others works that examined the same dataset and exhibit good agreement with them.