English

Probabilistic Stellar Age Estimation for Gaia XP Stars with NGBoost

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2026-07-20 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Stellar age is a fundamental quantity for Galactic archaeology, but reliable age estimation for large stellar samples remains challenging. In this work, we develop an uncertainty aware NGBoost framework for stellar age estimation using Gaia XP-derived atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances. Different from the standard NGBoost model, we modify the loss function by incorporating the uncertainties of the training age labels. We further use a Monte Carlo strategy to quantify the influence of input-feature uncertainties on the predicted ages. The resulting model provides age estimates together with uncertainty estimates. Applying this framework to Gaia XP stars, we construct a stellar age catalog containing 15,175,107 stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.17932,
  title  = {Probabilistic Stellar Age Estimation for Gaia XP Stars with NGBoost},
  author = {Xiaokun Hou and Wenbo Wu and Gang Zhao and Haining Li and Jingkun Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.17932},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (PRAI 2026). 6 pages, 4 figures; stellar age catalog available online