Paper detail

Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars. III. Classification of Kepler Eclipsing Binary Light Curves with Locally Linear Embedding

We present an automated classification of 2165 \textit{Kepler} eclipsing binary (EB) light curves that accompanied the second \textit{Kepler} data release. The light curves are classified using Locally Linear Embedding, a general nonlinear dimensionality reduction tool, into morphology types (detached, semi-detached, overcontact, ellipsoidal). The method, related to a more widely used Principal Component Analysis, produces a lower-dimensional representation of the input data while preserving local geometry and, consequently, the similarity between neighboring data points. We use this property to reduce the dimensionality in a series of steps to a one-dimensional manifold and classify light curves with a single parameter that is a measure of "detachedness" of the system. This fully automated classification correlates well with the manual determination of morphology from the data release, and also efficiently highlights any misclassified objects. Once a lower-dimensional projection space is defined, the classification of additional light curves runs in a negligible time and the method can therefore be used as a fully automated classifier in pipeline structures. The classifier forms a tier of the \textit{Kepler} EB pipeline that pre-processes light curves for the artificial intelligence based parameter estimator.