Identifying the Absorption Bump with Deep Learning

The pervasive interstellar dust grains provide significant insights to understand the formation and evolution of the stars, planetary systems, and the galaxies, and may harbor the building blocks of life. One of the most effective way to analyze the dust is via their interaction with the light from background sources. The observed extinction curves and spectral features carry the information of the size and composition of dust. The broad absorption bump at 2175 Å absorption bump is the most prominent feature in the extinction curves. Traditionally, statistical methods are applied to detect the existence of the absorption bump. These methods require heavy preprocessing and the co-existence of other reference features to alleviate the influence from the noises. In this paper, we apply deep learning techniques to detect the broad absorption bump. We demonstrate the key steps for training the selected models and their results. The success of deep learning based method inspires us to generalize a common methodology for broader science discovery problems. We present our on-going work to build the DeepDis system for such kind of applications.