Journal article
Quasi-periodic Gaussian processes for stellar activity: From physical to kernel parameters
- Abstract:
- In recent years, Gaussian Process (GP) regression has become widely used to analyse stellar and exoplanet time-series data sets. For spotted stars, the most popular GP covariance function is the quasi-periodic (QP) kernel, whose hyperparameters of the GP have a plausible interpretation in terms of physical properties of the star and spots. In this paper, we test the reliability of this interpretation by modelling data simulated using a spot model using a QP GP, and the recently proposed quasi-periodic plus cosine (QPC) GP, comparing the posterior distributions of the GP hyperparameters to the input parameters of the spot model. We find excellent agreement between the input stellar rotation period and the QP and QPC GP period, and very good agreement between the spot decay time-scale and the length scale of the squared exponential term. We also compare the hyperparameters derived from light and radial velocity (RV) curves for a given star, finding that the period and evolution time-scales are in good agreement. However, the harmonic complexity of the GP, while displaying no clear correlation with the spot properties in our simulations, is systematically higher for the RV than for the light-curve data. Finally, for the QP kernel, we investigate the impact of noise and time-sampling on the hyperparameters in the case of RVs. Our results indicate that good coverage of rotation period and spot evolution time-scales is more important than the total number of points, and noise characteristics govern the harmonic complexity.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/mnras/stac2097
Authors
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society More from this journal
- Volume:
- 515
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 5251-5266
- Publication date:
- 2022-07-28
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-07-22
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1365-2966
- ISSN:
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0035-8711
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1276372
- Local pid:
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pubs:1276372
- Deposit date:
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2023-08-15
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Nicholson and Aigrain
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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