MADE: a spectroscopic mass, age, and distance estimator for red giant stars with Bayesian machine learning

Abstract

We present a new approach (MADE) that generates mass, age, and distance estimates of red giant stars from a combination of astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic data. The core of the approach is a Bayesian artificial neural network (ANN) that learns from and completely replaces stellar isochrones. The ANN is trained using a sample of red giant stars with mass estimates from asteroseismology. A Bayesian isochrone pipeline uses the astrometric, photometric, spectroscopic, and asteroseismology data to determine posterior distributions for the training outputs: mass, age, and distance. Given new inputs, posterior predictive distributions for the outputs are computed, taking into account both input uncertainties, and uncertainties in the ANN parameters. We apply MADE to $\sim10\,000$ red giants in the overlap between the 14$^{\mathrm{th}}$ data release from the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE, Abolfathi et al. 2018) and the Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution (TGAS, Michalik et al. 2015). The ANN is able to reduce the uncertainty on mass, age, and distance estimates for training-set stars with high output uncertainties allocated through the Bayesian isochrone pipeline. The fractional uncertainties on mass are $<10\%$ and on age are between $10$ to $25\%$. Moreover, the time taken for our ANN to predict masses, ages, and distances for the entire catalogue of APOGEE-TGAS stars is of a similar order of the time taken by the Bayesian isochrone pipeline to run on a handful of stars. Our resulting catalogue clearly demonstrates the expected thick and thin disc components in the [M/H]-[$\alpha$/M] plane, when examined by age.