Journal article
AppleCiDEr. II. SpectraNet—A Spectroscopic Neural Network Classifier for Transients Demonstrated on ZTF Follow-up Data
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v 138(9), 94504
01 Sep 2026
Featured in Collection : Drexel's Newest Publications
Abstract
Time-domain surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility have opened a new frontier in the discovery and characterization of transients. While photometric light curves provide broad temporal coverage, spectroscopic observations remain crucial for physical interpretation and source classification. However, existing spectral analysis methods—often reliant on template fitting or parametric models—are limited in their ability to capture the complex and evolving spectra characteristic of such sources, which are sometimes only available at low resolution. In this work, we introduce SpectraNet, a deep convolutional neural network designed to learn robust representations of optical spectra from transients. Our model combines multi-scale convolution kernels and pooling operations to extract features from preprocessed spectra in a hierarchical and interpretable manner. We train and validate SpectraNet on low-resolution time-series spectra obtained from the Spectral Energy Distribution Machine and other instruments, demonstrating better performance in classification compared to other known pipelines.
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Details
- Title
- AppleCiDEr. II. SpectraNet—A Spectroscopic Neural Network Classifier for Transients Demonstrated on ZTF Follow-up Data
- Creators
- Maojie Xu - University of Minnesota SystemArgyro Sasli - University of Minnesota SystemAlexandra Junell - University of Minnesota SystemFelipe Fontinele Nunes - University of Minnesota SystemYu-Jing Qin - California Institute of TechnologyChristoffer Fremling - California Institute of TechnologySam Rose - California Institute of TechnologyTheophile Jegou Du LazBenny Border - University of Minnesota SystemAntoine Le Calloch - University of Minnesota SystemSushant Sharma Chaudhary - University of Minnesota SystemHailey Markoff - University of Minnesota SystemAvyukt Raghuvanshi - University of Minnesota SystemNabeel Rehemtulla - Simons FoundationJesper Sollerman - Stockholm UniversityYashvi Sharma - California Institute of TechnologyNiharika Sravan - Drexel UniversityJudy Adler - Institut für Palliative CareTracy X ChenRichard Dekany - California Institute of TechnologyReed Riddle - California Institute of TechnologyMansi M Kasliwal - California Institute of TechnologyMatthew J Graham - California Institute of TechnologyMichael W Coughlin - University of Minnesota System
- Publication Details
- Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v 138(9), 94504
- Publisher
- IOP Publishing
- Number of pages
- 11
- Grant note
- National Science Foundation: PHY-2117997, PHY-2308862, PHY-2409481
The UMN authors acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation with grant Nos. PHY-2117997, PHY-2308862 and PHY-2409481.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Physics
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001875313900001
- Other Identifier
- 991022208560304721