A new method for classification of galaxy spectra is presented, based on a
recently introduced information theoretical principle, the `Information
Bottleneck'. For any desired number of classes, galaxies are classified such
that the information content about the spectra is maximally preserved. The
result is classes of galaxies with similar spectra, where the similarity is
determined via a measure of information. We apply our method to approximately
6000 galaxy spectra from the ongoing 2dF redshift survey, and a mock-2dF
catalogue produced by a Cold Dark Matter-based semi-analytic model of galaxy
formation. We find a good match between the mean spectra of the classes found
in the data and in the models. For the mock catalogue, we find that the classes
produced by our algorithm form an intuitively sensible sequence in terms of
physical properties such as colour, star formation activity, morphology, and
internal velocity dispersion. We also show the correlation of the classes with
the projections resulting from a Principal Component Analysis.Comment: submitted to MNRAS, 17 pages, Latex, with 14 figures embedde