Photometric redshifts from SDSS images using a convolutional neural network
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We developed a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), used as a classifier, to estimate photometric redshifts and associated probability distribution functions (PDF) for galaxies in the Main Galaxy Sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at z < 0.4. Our method exploits all the information present in the images without any feature extraction. The input data consist of 64 × 64 pixel ugriz images centered on the spectroscopic targets, plus the galactic reddening value on the line-of-sight. For training sets of 100k objects or more (≥20% of the database), we reach a dispersion σ MAD < 0.01, significantly lower than the current best one obtained from another machine learning technique on the same sample. The bias is lower than 10 −4 , independent of photometric redshift. The PDFs are shown to have very good predictive power. We also find that the CNN redshifts are unbiased with respect to galaxy inclination, and that σ MAD decreases with the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), achieving values below 0.007 for S / N > 100, as in the deep stacked region of Stripe 82. We argue that for most galaxies the precision is limited by the S/N of SDSS images rather than by the method. The success of this experiment at low redshift opens promising perspectives for upcoming surveys.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".