2025
Pretrained Transformers for AGN Time Series Forecasting
This research-focused project explores advanced time-series forecasting techniques for modeling the highly noisy and irregular emission patterns of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The study compares classical machine learning baselines, LSTM networks, and transformer-based large time series models (Sundial) using multi-resolution data (daily, weekly, and monthly). A censoring-aware preprocessing pipeline was designed to handle upper-limit observations, noise, and data sparsity without target leakage. The model incorporates object and granularity embeddings to enable global learning across multiple AGNs while preserving source-specific behavior. Experimental results show that LSTM models outperform transformer-based approaches on limited datasets, highlighting important trade-offs between model complexity, inductive bias, and data scale in real-world scientific forecasting tasks.