Meta-Learning One-Class Classification with DeepSets: Application in the Milky Way

We explore in this paper the use of neural networks designed for point-clouds and sets on a new meta-learning task. We present experiments on the astronomical challenge of characterizing the stellar population of stellar streams. Stellar streams are elongated structures of stars in the outskirts of the Milky Way that form when a (small) galaxy breaks up under the Milky Way's gravitational force. We consider that we obtain, for each stream, a small 'support set' of stars that belongs to this stream. We aim to predict if the other stars in that region of the sky are from that stream or not, similar to one-class classification. Each "stream task" could also be transformed into a binary classification problem in a highly imbalanced regime (or supervised anomaly detection) by using the much bigger set of "other" stars and considering them as noisy negative examples. We propose to study the problem in the meta-learning regime: we expect that we can learn general information on characterizing a stream's stellar population by meta-learning across several streams in a fully supervised regime, and transfer it to new streams using only positive supervision. We present a novel use of Deep Sets, a model developed for point-cloud and sets, trained in a meta-learning fully supervised regime, and evaluated in a one-class classification setting. We compare it against Random Forests (with and without self-labeling) in the classic setting of binary classification, retrained for each task. We show that our method outperforms the Random-Forests even though the Deep Sets is not retrained on the new tasks, and accesses only a small part of the data compared to the Random Forest. We also show that the model performs well on a real-life stream when including additional fine-tuning.