FCLC (Featureless Classification of Light Curves) software describes the static behavior of a light curve in a probabilistic way. Individual data points are converted to densities and consequently probability density are compared instead of features. This gives rise to an independent classification which can corroborate the usefulness of the selected features.

Deep Convolutional Mixture Density Network (DCMDN) estimates probabilistic photometric redshift directly from multi-band imaging data by combining a version of a deep convolutional network with a mixture density network. The estimates are expressed as Gaussian mixture models representing the probability density functions (PDFs) in the redshift space. In addition to the traditional scores, the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and the probability integral transform (PIT) are applied as performance criteria. DCMDN is able to predict redshift PDFs independently from the type of source, e.g. galaxies, quasars or stars and renders pre-classification of objects and feature extraction unnecessary; the method is extremely general and allows the solving of any kind of probabilistic regression problems based on imaging data, such as estimating metallicity or star formation rate in galaxies.

Morphological classification is one of the most demanding challenges in astronomy. With the advent of all-sky surveys, an enormous amount of imaging data is publicly available, and are typically analyzed by experts or encouraged amateur volunteers. For upcoming surveys with billions of objects, however, such an approach is not feasible anymore. PINK (Parallelized rotation and flipping INvariant Kohonen maps) is a simple yet effective variant of a rotation-invariant self-organizing map that is suitable for many analysis tasks in astronomy. The code reduces the computational complexity via modern GPUs and applies the resulting framework to galaxy data for morphological analysis.

Context. We present a probabilistic cross-correlation approach to estimate time delays in the context of reverberation mapping (RM) of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).

Aims. We reformulate the traditional interpolated cross-correlation method as a statistically principled model that delivers a posterior distribution for the delay.

Methods. The method employs Gaussian processes as a model for observed AGN light curves. We describe the mathematical formalism and demonstrate the new approach using both simulated light curves and available RM observations.

Results. The proposed method delivers a posterior distribution for the delay that accounts for observational noise and the non-uniform sampling of the light curves. This feature allow us to fully quantify its uncertainty and propagate it to subsequent calculations of dependant physical quantities, e.g., black hole masses. It delivers out-of-sample predictions, which enables us to subject it to model selection and it can calculate the joint posterior delay for more than two light curves.

Conclusions. Because of the numerous advantages of our reformulation and the simplicity of its application, we anticipate that our method will find favour not only in the specialised community of RM, but in all fields where cross-correlation analysis is performed. We provide the algorithms and examples of their application as part of our Julia GPCC package.