OF GENES AND MACHINES: APPLICATION OF A COMBINATION OF MACHINE LEARNING TOOLS TO ASTRONOMY DATA SETS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We apply a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and support vector machine (SVM) machine learning algorithms to solve two important problems faced by the astronomical community: star–galaxy separation and photometric redshift estimation of galaxies in survey catalogs. We use the GA to select the relevant features in the first step, followed by optimization of SVM parameters in the second step to obtain an optimal set of parameters to classify or regress, in the process of which we avoid overfitting. We apply our method to star–galaxy separation in Pan-STARRS1 data. We show that our method correctly classifies 98% of objects down to i P1 = 24.5 , with a completeness (or true positive rate) of 99% for galaxies and 88% for stars. By combining colors with morphology, our star–galaxy separation method yields better results than the new SExtractor classifier spread_model, in particular at the faint end ( i P1 > 22 ). We also use our method to derive photometric redshifts for galaxies in the COSMOS bright multiwavelength data set down to an error in ( 1 + z ) of σ = 0.013 , which compares well with estimates from spectral energy distribution fitting on the same data ( σ = 0.007 ) while making a significantly smaller number of assumptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".