We present a catalog of quasars selected from broad-band photometric ugri
data of the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 3 (KiDS DR3). The QSOs are
identified by the random forest (RF) supervised machine learning model, trained
on SDSS DR14 spectroscopic data. We first cleaned the input KiDS data from
entries with excessively noisy, missing or otherwise problematic measurements.
Applying a feature importance analysis, we then tune the algorithm and identify
in the KiDS multiband catalog the 17 most useful features for the
classification, namely magnitudes, colors, magnitude ratios, and the stellarity
index. We used the t-SNE algorithm to map the multi-dimensional photometric
data onto 2D planes and compare the coverage of the training and inference
sets. We limited the inference set to r<22 to avoid extrapolation beyond the
feature space covered by training, as the SDSS spectroscopic sample is
considerably shallower than KiDS. This gives 3.4 million objects in the final
inference sample, from which the random forest identified 190,000 quasar
candidates. Accuracy of 97%, purity of 91%, and completeness of 87%, as derived
from a test set extracted from SDSS and not used in the training, are confirmed
by comparison with external spectroscopic and photometric QSO catalogs
overlapping with the KiDS footprint. The robustness of our results is
strengthened by number counts of the quasar candidates in the r band, as well
as by their mid-infrared colors available from WISE. An analysis of parallaxes
and proper motions of our QSO candidates found also in Gaia DR2 suggests that a
probability cut of p(QSO)>0.8 is optimal for purity, whereas p(QSO)>0.7 is
preferable for better completeness. Our study presents the first comprehensive
quasar selection from deep high-quality KiDS data and will serve as the basis
for versatile studies of the QSO population detected by this survey.Comment: Data available from the KiDS website at
http://kids.strw.leidenuniv.nl/DR3/quasarcatalog.php and the source code from
https://github.com/snakoneczny/kids-quasar