$\text{tdescore}$: An Accurate Photometric Classifier for Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract

Optical surveys have become increasingly adept at identifying candidate Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) in large numbers, but classifying these generally requires extensive spectroscopic resources. Here we present $\text{tdescore}$, a simple binary photometric classifier that is trained using a systematic census of $\sim$3000 nuclear transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). The sample is highly imbalanced, with TDEs representing $\sim$2% of the total. $\text{tdescore}$ is nonetheless able to reject non-TDEs with 99.6% accuracy, yielding a sample of probable TDEs with recall of 77.5% for a precision of 80.2%. $\text{tdescore}$ is thus substantially better than any available TDE photometric classifier scheme in the literature, with performance not far from spectroscopy as a method for classifying ZTF nuclear transients, despite relying solely on ZTF data and multi-wavelength catalogue cross-matching. In a novel extension, we use `SHapley Additive exPlanations' ($\text{SHAP}$) to provide a human-readable justification for each individual $\text{tdescore}$ classification, enabling users to understand and form opinions about the underlying classifier reasoning. $\text{tdescore}$ can serve as a model for photometric identification of TDEs with time-domain surveys, such as the upcoming Rubin observatory.

Accepted for publication, 16 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (23)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives
• astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python
• Initial Performance of the NEOWISE Reactivation Mission
• A Continuum of H- to He-Rich Tidal Disruption Candidates With a Preference for E+A Galaxies
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Observing System
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey
• The GROWTH Marshal: A Dynamic Science Portal for Time-Domain Astronomy
• A Fully Automated Integral Field Spectrograph Pipeline for the SEDMachine: pysedm
• The Zwicky Transient Facility Alert Distribution System
• Machine Learning for the Zwicky Transient Facility
• The Million Quasars (Milliquas) Catalogue, v8
• A Morphological Classification Model to Identify Unresolved PanSTARRS1 Sources: Application in the ZTF Real-Time Pipeline
• Gaia Data Release 3: The extragalactic content
• A light in the dark: searching for electromagnetic counterparts to black hole-black hole mergers in LIGO/Virgo O3 with the Zwicky Transient Facility
• A data science platform to enable time-domain astronomy
• New Modules for the SEDMachine to Remove Contaminations from Cosmic Rays and Non-target Light: BYECR and CONTSEP
• The wide-field infrared transient explorer (WINTER)
• Identifying Tidal Disruption Events with an Expansion of the FLEET Machine Learning Algorithm
• Two Candidate Obscured Tidal Disruption Events Coincident with High-energy Neutrinos

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Early Identification of Optical Tidal Disruption Events: A science module for the Fink broker
• Optical polarization of stellar-fed active and quiescent supermassive black holes
• The automation of optical transient discovery and classification in Rubin-era time-domain astronomy
• A Photometric Classifier for Tidal Disruption Events in Rubin LSST
• TDE 2025abcr: A Tidal Disruption Event in the Outskirts of a Massive Galaxy
• Rates of Strongly Lensed Tidal Disruption Events