exoplanet

exoplanet is a toolkit for probabilistic modeling of transit and/or radial velocity observations of exoplanets and other astronomical time series using PyMC3. PyMC3 is a flexible and high-performance model building language and inference engine that scales well to problems with a large number of parameters. exoplanet extends PyMC3’s language to support many of the custom functions and distributions required when fitting exoplanet datasets. These features include:

• A fast and robust solver for Kepler’s equation.
• Scalable Gaussian Processes using celerite.
• Fast and accurate limb darkened light curves using starry.
• Common reparameterizations for limb darkening parameters, and planet radius and impact parameter.
• And many others!

All of these functions and distributions include methods for efficiently calculating their gradients so that they can be used with gradient-based inference methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, No U-Turns Sampling, and variational inference. These methods tend to be more robust than the methods more commonly used in astronomy (like ensemble samplers and nested sampling) especially when the model has more than a few parameters. For many exoplanet applications, exoplanet (the code) can improve the typical performance by orders of magnitude.

exoplanet is being actively developed in a public repository on GitHub so if you have any trouble, open an issue there.