Hunting for “Oddballs” with Machine Learning: Detecting Anomalous Exoplanets Using a Deep-Learned Low-Dimensional Representation of Transit Spectra with Autoencoders
This study explores the application of autoencoder-based machine learning techniques for anomaly detection to identify exoplanet atmospheres with unconventional chemical signatures using a low-dimensional data representation. We use the Atmospheric Big Challenge (ABC) database, a publicly available dataset with over 100,000 simulated exoplanet spectra, to construct an anomaly detection scenario by defining CO2-rich atmospheres as anomalies and CO2-poor atmospheres as the normal class. We benchmarked four different anomaly detection strategies: Autoencoder Reconstruction Loss, One-Class Support Vector Machine (1 […]