Detecting Quasars in Large-Scale Astronomical Surveys

We present a classification-based approach to identify quasi-stellar radio sources (quasars) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and evaluate its performance on a manually labeled training set. While reasonable results can already be obtained via approaches working only on photometric data, our experiments indicate that simple but problem-specific features extracted from spectroscopic data can significantly improve the classification performance. Since our approach works orthogonal to existing classification schemes used for building the spectroscopic catalogs, our classification results are well suited for a mutual assessment of the approaches' accuracies.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, published in proceedings of 2010 Ninth International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA) of the IEE

e-Distance Weighted Support Vector Regression

We propose a novel support vector regression approach called e-Distance Weighted Support Vector Regression (e-DWSVR).e-DWSVR specifically addresses two challenging issues in support vector regression: first, the process of noisy data; second, how to deal with the situation when the distribution of boundary data is different from that of the overall data. The proposed e-DWSVR optimizes the minimum margin and the mean of functional margin simultaneously to tackle these two issues. In addition, we use both dual coordinate descent (CD) and averaged stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) strategies to make e-DWSVR scalable to large scale problems. We report promising results obtained by e-DWSVR in comparison with existing methods on several benchmark datasets

Modelling tourism demand to Spain with machine learning techniques. The impact of forecast horizon on model selection

This study assesses the influence of the forecast horizon on the forecasting performance of several machine learning techniques. We compare the fo recastaccuracy of Support Vector Regression (SVR) to Neural Network (NN) models, using a linear model as a benchmark. We focus on international tourism demand to all seventeen regions of Spain. The SVR with a Gaussian radial basis function kernel outperforms the rest of the models for the longest forecast horizons. We also find that machine learning methods improve their forecasting accuracy with respect to linear models as forecast horizons increase. This results shows the suitability of SVR for medium and long term forecasting.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version