# Explainable classification of astronomical uncertain time series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [MINIROCKET: A Very Fast (Almost) Deterministic Transform for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08791/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Multivariate Time Series Classification Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13156/) (2020)
- [HIVE-COTE 2.0: a new meta ensemble for time series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07551/) (2021)
- [sktime: A Unified Interface for Machine Learning with Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07872/) (2019)
- [A Time Series Forest for Classification and Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.2277/) (2013)
- [TS-CHIEF: A Scalable and Accurate Forest Algorithm for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10329/) (2019)
- [Multivariate Time Series Classification with WEASEL+MUSE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11343/) (2017)
- [The Canonical Interval Forest (CIF) Classifier for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09172/) (2020)
- [Fast and Accurate Time Series Classification with WEASEL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07681/) (2017)
- [The Temporal Dictionary Ensemble (TDE) Classifier for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03841/) (2021)
- [XEM: An Explainable-by-Design Ensemble Method for Multivariate Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03645/) (2020)
- [Fink: early supernovae Ia classification using active learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11438/) (2021)
- [Machine Learning and the future of Supernova Cosmology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02315/) (2019)
- [Uncertain Time Series Classification With Shapelet Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02090/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Exploring the expansion history of the universe, understanding its evolutionary stages, and predicting its future evolution are important goals in astrophysics. Today, machine learning tools are used to help achieving these goals by analyzing transient sources, which are modeled as uncertain time series. Although black-box methods achieve appreciable performance, existing interpretable time series methods failed to obtain acceptable performance for this type of data. Furthermore, data uncertainty is rarely taken into account in these methods. In this work, we propose an uncertaintyaware subsequence based model which achieves a classification comparable to that of state-of-the-art methods. Unlike conformal learning which estimates model uncertainty on predictions, our method takes data uncertainty as additional input. Moreover, our approach is explainable-by-design, giving domain experts the ability to inspect the model and explain its predictions. The explainability of the proposed method has also the potential to inspire new developments in theoretical astrophysics modeling by suggesting important subsequences which depict details of light curve shapes. The dataset, the source code of our experiment, and the results are made available on a public repository.