301 research outputs found
The Overlooked Potential of Generalized Linear Models in Astronomy - I: Binomial Regression
Revealing hidden patterns in astronomical data is often the path to
fundamental scientific breakthroughs; meanwhile the complexity of scientific
inquiry increases as more subtle relationships are sought. Contemporary data
analysis problems often elude the capabilities of classical statistical
techniques, suggesting the use of cutting edge statistical methods. In this
light, astronomers have overlooked a whole family of statistical techniques for
exploratory data analysis and robust regression, the so-called Generalized
Linear Models (GLMs). In this paper -- the first in a series aimed at
illustrating the power of these methods in astronomical applications -- we
elucidate the potential of a particular class of GLMs for handling
binary/binomial data, the so-called logit and probit regression techniques,
from both a maximum likelihood and a Bayesian perspective. As a case in point,
we present the use of these GLMs to explore the conditions of star formation
activity and metal enrichment in primordial minihaloes from cosmological
hydro-simulations including detailed chemistry, gas physics, and stellar
feedback. We predict that for a dark mini-halo with metallicity , an increase of in the gas
molecular fraction, increases the probability of star formation occurrence by a
factor of 75%. Finally, we highlight the use of receiver operating
characteristic curves as a diagnostic for binary classifiers, and ultimately we
use these to demonstrate the competitive predictive performance of GLMs against
the popular technique of artificial neural networks.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Astronomy
and Computin
Radio Galaxy Zoo: Knowledge Transfer Using Rotationally Invariant Self-Organising Maps
With the advent of large scale surveys the manual analysis and classification
of individual radio source morphologies is rendered impossible as existing
approaches do not scale. The analysis of complex morphological features in the
spatial domain is a particularly important task. Here we discuss the challenges
of transferring crowdsourced labels obtained from the Radio Galaxy Zoo project
and introduce a proper transfer mechanism via quantile random forest
regression. By using parallelized rotation and flipping invariant Kohonen-maps,
image cubes of Radio Galaxy Zoo selected galaxies formed from the FIRST radio
continuum and WISE infrared all sky surveys are first projected down to a
two-dimensional embedding in an unsupervised way. This embedding can be seen as
a discretised space of shapes with the coordinates reflecting morphological
features as expressed by the automatically derived prototypes. We find that
these prototypes have reconstructed physically meaningful processes across two
channel images at radio and infrared wavelengths in an unsupervised manner. In
the second step, images are compared with those prototypes to create a
heat-map, which is the morphological fingerprint of each object and the basis
for transferring the user generated labels. These heat-maps have reduced the
feature space by a factor of 248 and are able to be used as the basis for
subsequent ML methods. Using an ensemble of decision trees we achieve upwards
of 85.7% and 80.7% accuracy when predicting the number of components and peaks
in an image, respectively, using these heat-maps. We also question the
currently used discrete classification schema and introduce a continuous scale
that better reflects the uncertainty in transition between two classes, caused
by sensitivity and resolution limits
An HST Snapshot Survey of Proto-Planetary Nebulae Candidates: Two Types of Axisymmetric Reflection Nebulosities
We report the results from an optical imaging survey of proto-planetary
nebula candidates using the HST. We exploited the high resolving power and wide
dynamic range of HST and detected nebulosities in 21 of 27 sources. All
detected reflection nebulosities show elongation, and the nebula morphology
bifurcates depending on the degree of the central star obscuration. The
Star-Obvious Low-level-Elongated (SOLE) nebulae show a bright central star
embedded in a faint, extended nebulosity, whereas the DUst-Prominent
Longitudinally-EXtended (DUPLEX) nebulae have remarkable bipolar structure with
a completely or partially obscured central star. The intrinsic axisymmetry of
these proto-planetary nebula reflection nebulosities demonstrates that the
axisymmetry frequently found in planetary nebulae predates the proto-planetary
nebula phase, confirming previous independent results. We suggest that
axisymmetry in proto-planetary nebulae is created by an equatorially enhanced
superwind at the end of the asymptotic giant branch phase. We discuss that the
apparent morphological dichotomy is caused by a difference in the optical
thickness of the circumstellar dust/gas shell with a differing equator-to-pole
density contrast. Moreover, we show that SOLE and DUPLEX nebulae are physically
distinct types of proto-planetary nebulae, with a suggestion that higher mass
progenitor AGB stars are more likely to become DUPLEX proto-planetary nebulae.Comment: 27 pages (w/ aaspp4.sty), 6 e/ps figures, 4 tables (w/ apjpt4.sty).
Data images are available via ADIL
(http://imagelib.ncsa.uiuc.edu/document/99.TU.01) To be published in Ap
Using machine learning to study the kinematics of cold gas in galaxies
Next generation interferometers, such as the Square Kilometre Array, are set to obtain vast quantities of information about the kinematics of cold gas in galaxies. Given the volume of data produced by such facilities astronomers will need fast, reliable, tools to informatively filter and classify incoming data in real time. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques with a hydrodynamical simulation training set to predict the kinematic behaviour of cold gas in galaxies and test these models on both simulated and real interferometric data. Using the power of a convolutional autoencoder we embed kinematic features, unattainable by the human eye or standard tools, into a 3D space and discriminate between disturbed and regularly rotating cold gas structures. Our simple binary classifier predicts the circularity of noiseless, simulated, galaxies with a recall of 85% and performs as expected on observational CO and H i velocity maps, with a heuristic accuracy of 95%. The model output exhibits predictable behaviour when varying the level of noise added to the input data and we are able to explain the roles of all dimensions of our mapped space. Our models also allow fast predictions of input galaxies’ position angles with a 1σ uncertainty range of ±17° to ±23° (for galaxies with inclinations of 82.5° to 32.5°, respectively), which may be useful for initial parametrization in kinematic modelling samplers. Machine learning models, such as the one outlined in this paper, may be adapted for SKA science usage in the near future
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