Performant feature extraction for photometric time series

Abstract

Astronomy is entering the era of large surveys of the variable sky such as Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which are intended to produce up to a million alerts per night. Such an amount of photometric data requires efficient light-curve pre-processing algorithms for the purposes of subsequent data quality cuts, classification, and characterization analysis. In this work, we present the new library "light-curve" for Python and Rust, which is intended for feature extraction from light curves of variable astronomical sources. The library is suitable for machine learning classification problems: it provides a fast implementation of feature extractors, which outperforms other public available codes, and consists of dozens features describing shape, magnitude distribution, and periodic properties of light curves. It includes not only features which had been shown to provide a high performance in classification tasks, but also new features we developed to improve classification quality of selected types of objects. The "light-curve" library is currently used by the ANTARES, AMPEL, and Fink broker systems for analyzing the ZTF alert stream, and has been selected for use with the LSST.