Boosting decision trees for Main Belt Asteroid selection in planetary ephemerides: an alternative model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to select a smaller subset of main belt asteroids for planetary ephemerides, reducing model complexity while maintaining accuracy in Mars orbit predictions.

Contribution

It proposes an innovative approach to reduce the number of asteroids modeled as point masses without significantly affecting residuals, improving computational efficiency.

Findings

Reduced the number of asteroids in the model

Maintained accuracy of Mars orbit predictions

Enhanced computational efficiency

Abstract

One of the main bottleneck in assessing the accuracy of Mars orbit is the unknown value of the asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt. Nowadays a modeling with 343 asteroids as point masses is used, with the relative masses fitted to observational data. In the current work we propose an innovative methodology to reduce the number of asteroids implemented as point masses, thus reducing the number of parameters to be fitted, without a significant degradation of the postfit residuals.