Estimating Planetary Mass with Deep Learning

Abstract

While thousands of exoplanets have been confirmed, the known properties about individual discoveries remain sparse and depend on detection technique. To utilize more than a small section of the exoplanet dataset, tools need to be developed to estimate missing values based on the known measurements. Here, we demonstrate the use of a neural network that models the density of planets in a space of six properties that is then used to impute a probability distribution for missing values. Our results focus on planetary mass which neither the radial velocity nor transit techniques for planet identification can provide alone. The neural network can impute mass across the four orders of magnitude in the exoplanet archive, and return a distribution of masses for each planet that can inform about trends in the underlying dataset. The average error on this mass estimate from a radial velocity detection is a factor of 1.5 of the observed value, and 2.7 for a transit observation. The mass of Proxima Centauri b found by this method is $1.6^{\rm +0.46}_{\rm -0.36}$ M$_\oplus$, where the upper and lower bounds are derived from the root mean square deviation from the log mass probability distribution. The network can similarly impute the other potentially missing properties, and we use this to predict planet radius for radial velocity measurements, with an average error of a factor 1.4 of the observed value. The ability of neural networks to search for patterns in multidimensional data means that such techniques have the potential to greatly expand the use of the exoplanet catalogue.