https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01105-8
Regular Article
Detecting nonlinearity in the light curves of active galactic nuclei
1
Tokyo University of Science, 102-0071, Fujimi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
2
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, 181-8588, Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan
Received:
13
October
2020
Accepted:
11
January
2021
Published online:
19
January
2021
This paper discusses a statistical method of detecting nonlinearity in the light curves of active galactic nuclei (AGN). We model the light curves of AGN by two-variate stochastic differential equation (SDE) in which one variable is observable but not the other. Applying a nonparametric model of the SDE as well as its parametric models of linear and quadratic functions to the light curves provided by the Kepler satellite, we estimate the three models and thereby compare their prediction accuracy to detect nonlinearity. The results suggest that there exist quadratic or other nonlinearities in the light curves, while the others exhibit linearity.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021
