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Related papers: Deep modeling of quasar variability

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We present the results of a search for variability in the equivalent widths (EWs) of narrow, associated (Delta v < 5,000 km/s) absorption lines found in the UV spectra of z < 1.5 quasars. The goal of this search was to use variability as a…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 J. H. Wise , M. Eracleous , J. C. Charlton , . R. Ganguly

Quasars,asextremelyluminousanddistantspecialcelestialbodiesintheuniverse,aredrivenbyacomplexsystemcomposedof supermassiveblackholesandsurroundingaccretiondisks.Thispaperadoptsatime-domainobservationstrategyandcombines the analysis of light…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-03-24 Xuan Wei , J. Tang , Yu Tao , XiaoHan Zhang

We quantify quasar color-variability using an unprecedented variability database - ugriz photometry of 9093 quasars from SDSS Stripe 82, observed over 8 years at ~60 epochs each. We confirm previous reports that quasars become bluer when…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-30 Kasper B. Schmidt , Hans-Walter Rix , Joseph C. Shields , Matthias Knecht , David W. Hogg , Dan Maoz , Jo Bovy

We develop a method for separating quasars from other variable point sources using SDSS Stripe 82 light curve data for ~10,000 variable objects. To statistically describe quasar variability, we use a damped random walk model parametrized by…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2011-01-28 C. L. MacLeod , K. Brooks , Z. Ivezic , C. S. Kochanek , R. Gibson , A. Meisner , S. Kozlowski , B. Sesar , A. C. Becker , W. de Vries

Macromolecular and biomolecular folding landscapes typically contain high free energy barriers that impede efficient sampling of configurational space by standard molecular dynamics simulation. Biased sampling can artificially drive the…

Biological Physics · Physics 2018-11-01 Wei Chen , Andrew L Ferguson

Incorporating nonlinearity is paramount to predicting the future states of a dynamical system, its response to shocks, and its underlying causal network. However, most existing methods for causality detection and impulse response, such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-08 Kurt Izak Cabanilla , Kevin Thomas Go

In recent years, the field of machine learning has made phenomenal progress in the pursuit of simulating real-world data generation processes. One notable example of such success is the variational autoencoder (VAE). In this work, with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-30 Hwan Goh , Sheroze Sheriffdeen , Jonathan Wittmer , Tan Bui-Thanh

The framework of variational autoencoders allows us to efficiently learn deep latent-variable models, such that the model's marginal distribution over observed variables fits the data. Often, we're interested in going a step further, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Ilyes Khemakhem , Diederik P. Kingma , Ricardo Pio Monti , Aapo Hyvärinen

The relation between X-ray and UV/optical variability in AGNs has been explored in many individual sources, however a large sample study is yet absent. Through matching the XMM-Newton serendipitous X-ray and UV source catalogs with SDSS…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-04-20 Hao Sou , Jun-Xian Wang , Zhang-Liang Xie , Wen-Yong Kang , Zhen-Yi Cai

The well-known bluer-when-brighter trend observed in quasar variability is a signature of the complex processes in the accretion disk, and can be a probe of the quasar variability mechanism. Using a sample of 604 variable quasars with…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2014-03-05 John J. Ruan , Scott F. Anderson , Jason Dexter , Eric Agol

Variational autoencoders often assume isotropic Gaussian priors and mean-field posteriors, hence do not exploit structure in scenarios where we may expect similarity or consistency across latent variables. Gaussian process variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-17 Metod Jazbec , Michael Pearce , Vincent Fortuin

A damped random walk (DRW) process is often used to describe the temporal UV/optical continuum variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN). However, recent investigations have shown that this model fails to capture the full spectrum of AGN…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-21 Weixiang Yu , Gordon T. Richards , John J. Ruan , Michael S. Vogeley , Franz E. Bauer , Matthew J. Graham

UV/optical variability in quasars is a well-observed phenomenon, yet its primeval origins remain unclear. This study investigates whether the accretion disk turbulence, which is responsible for UV/optical variability, is influenced by the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-08-05 Liang Wu , Jun-Xian Wang , Wen-Ke Ren , Wen-Yong Kang

We model the time variability of ~9,000 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in SDSS Stripe 82 as a damped random walk. Using 2.7 million photometric measurements collected over 10 years, we confirm the results of Kelly et al. (2009) and…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2010-09-07 C. L. MacLeod , Ž. Ivezić , C. S. Kochanek , S. Kozłowski , B. C. Kelly , E. Bullock , A. Kimball , B. Sesar , D. Westman , K. Brooks , R. Gibson , A. C. Becker , W. H. de Vries

Among other uses, neural networks are a powerful tool for solving deterministic and Bayesian inverse problems in real-time, where variational autoencoders, a specialized type of neural network, enable the Bayesian estimation of model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Andrea Tonini , Luca Dede'

Predicting high-dimensional dynamical systems with irregular time steps presents significant challenges for current data-driven algorithms. These irregularities arise from missing data, sparse observations, or adaptive computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Kewei Zhu , Yanze Xin , Jinwei Hu , Xiaoyuan Cheng , Yiming Yang , Sibo Cheng

The main purpose of this work is to improve the existing knowledge about the most powerful engines in the Universe - quasars. Although a lot is already known, we still have only a vague idea how these engines work exactly, why they behave…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 R. Bachev , A. Strigachev , E. Semkov , B. Mihov

The study of quasar variability has long been seen as a way to understanding the structure of the central engine of active galactic nuclei, and as a means of verifying the morphology of the standard model. Much work has already been done on…

Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-24 M. R. S. Hawkins

Deep neural networks with discrete latent variables offer the promise of better symbolic reasoning, and learning abstractions that are more useful to new tasks. There has been a surge in interest in discrete latent variable models, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Aurko Roy , Ashish Vaswani , Arvind Neelakantan , Niki Parmar

Existing black box modeling approaches in machine learning suffer from a fixed input and output feature combination. In this paper, a new approach to reconstruct missing variables in a set of time series is presented. An autoencoder is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jan-Philipp Roche , Oliver Niggemann , Jens Friebe