English

nifty-ls: Fast and Accurate Lomb-Scargle Periodograms Using a Non-Uniform FFT

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2024-09-13 v1

Abstract

We present nifty-ls, a software package for fast and accurate evaluation of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram. nifty-ls leverages the fact that Lomb-Scargle can be computed using a non-uniform FFT (NUFFT), which we evaluate with the Flatiron Institute NUFFT package (finufft). This approach achieves a many-fold speedup over the Press & Rybicki (1989) method as implemented in Astropy and is simultaneously many orders of magnitude more accurate. nifty-ls also supports fast evaluation on GPUs via CUDA and integrates with the Astropy Lomb-Scargle interface. nifty-ls is publicly available as open-source software.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.08090,
  title  = {nifty-ls: Fast and Accurate Lomb-Scargle Periodograms Using a Non-Uniform FFT},
  author = {Lehman H. Garrison and Dan Foreman-Mackey and Yu-hsuan Shih and Alex Barnett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08090},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to RNAAS. Software available at https://github.com/flatironinstitute/nifty-ls/