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Rohan Nagavardhan
Rohan Nagavardhan

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ExoBoost: My Senior Year Research Project

My Project

Ever since I was in 3rd grade, the universe has been a source of curiosity for me. How does it work? And are there planets like ours? Growing up, I knew that astronomers were finding and collecting data on planets that were beyond our solar system but I wanted to know if there was an easier way to do find these planets called exoplanets. I wanted to see if machine learning could automate the process and I used my Python background to tackle this problem. I started in September and investigated all the current ways that we find exoplanets (traditional observation or other machine learning methods) I decided to create a machine learning tool that would return the number of planets based on radial velocity data which measures how fast a star moves away and toward our observation point on Earth. Looking back, it was definitely a challenging project, but I gained a lot a valuable experience and knowledge. I am still planning on working on it in the future.

Demo Link

Below is a link to the my website that has a detailed manuscript about the project. P.S. the website is still a work-in-progress!
https://rndev2017.github.io/ExoBoostInfo/

Link to Code

https://github.com/rndev2017/ExoBoost

How I built it...

  • Python
  • XGBoost
  • SciPy

Shout out to the rest of the Class of 2020! Congrats to all!

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