No Arabic abstract
We present a determination of the effects of including galaxy morphological parameters in photometric redshift estimation with an artificial neural network method. Neural networks, which recognize patterns in the information content of data in an unbiased way, can be a useful estimator of the additional information contained in extra parameters, such as those describing morphology, if the input data are treated on an equal footing. We use imaging and five band photometric magnitudes from the All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey. It is shown that certain principal components of the morphology information are correlated with galaxy type. However, we find that for the data used the inclusion of morphological information does not have a statistically significant benefit for photometric redshift estimation with the techniques employed here. The inclusion of these parameters may result in a trade-off between extra information and additional noise, with the additional noise becoming more dominant as more parameters are added.
Supernova (SN) classification and redshift estimation using photometric data only have become very important for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), given the large number of SNe that LSST will observe and the impossibility of spectroscopically following up all the SNe. We investigate the performance of a SN classifier that uses SN colors to classify LSST SNe with the Random Forest classification algorithm. Our classifier results in an AUC of 0.98 which represents excellent classification. We are able to obtain a photometric SN sample containing 99$%$ SNe Ia by choosing a probability threshold. We estimate the photometric redshifts (photo-z) of SNe in our sample by fitting the SN light curves using the SALT2 model with nested sampling. We obtain a mean bias ($left<z_mathrm{phot}-z_mathrm{spec}right>$) of 0.012 with $sigmaleft( frac{z_mathrm{phot}-z_mathrm{spec}}{1+z_mathrm{spec}}right) = 0.0294$ without using a host-galaxy photo-z prior, and a mean bias ($left<z_mathrm{phot}-z_mathrm{spec}right>$) of 0.0017 with $sigmaleft( frac{z_mathrm{phot}-z_mathrm{spec}}{1+z_mathrm{spec}}right) = 0.0116$ using a host-galaxy photo-z prior. Assuming a flat $Lambda CDM$ model with $Omega_m=0.3$, we obtain $Omega_m$ of $0.305pm0.008$ (statistical errors only), using the simulated LSST sample of photometric SNe Ia (with intrinsic scatter $sigma_mathrm{int}=0.11$) derived using our methodology without using host-galaxy photo-z prior. Our method will help boost the power of SNe from the LSST as cosmological probes.
The development of fast and accurate methods of photometric redshift estimation is a vital step towards being able to fully utilize the data of next-generation surveys within precision cosmology. In this paper we apply a specific approach to spectral connectivity analysis (SCA; Lee & Wasserman 2009) called diffusion map. SCA is a class of non-linear techniques for transforming observed data (e.g., photometric colours for each galaxy, where the data lie on a complex subset of p-dimensional space) to a simpler, more natural coordinate system wherein we apply regression to make redshift predictions. As SCA relies upon eigen-decomposition, our training set size is limited to ~ 10,000 galaxies; we use the Nystrom extension to quickly estimate diffusion coordinates for objects not in the training set. We apply our method to 350,738 SDSS main sample galaxies, 29,816 SDSS luminous red galaxies, and 5,223 galaxies from DEEP2 with CFHTLS ugriz photometry. For all three datasets, we achieve prediction accuracies on par with previous analyses, and find that use of the Nystrom extension leads to a negligible loss of prediction accuracy relative to that achieved with the training sets. As in some previous analyses (e.g., Collister & Lahav 2004, Ball et al. 2008), we observe that our predictions are generally too high (low) in the low (high) redshift regimes. We demonstrate that this is a manifestation of attenuation bias, wherein measurement error (i.e., uncertainty in diffusion coordinates due to uncertainty in the measured fluxes/magnitudes) reduces the slope of the best-fit regression line. Mitigation of this bias is necessary if we are to use photometric redshift estimates produced by computationally efficient empirical methods in precision cosmology.
Aims: We present a custom support vector machine classification package for photometric redshift estimation, including comparisons with other methods. We also explore the efficacy of including galaxy shape information in redshift estimation. Support vector machines, a type of machine learning, utilize optimization theory and supervised learning algorithms to construct predictive models based on the information content of data in a way that can treat different input features symmetrically. Methods: The custom support vector machine package we have developed is designated SPIDERz and made available to the community. As test data for evaluating performance and comparison with other methods, we apply SPIDERz to four distinct data sets: 1) the publicly available portion of the PHAT-1 catalog based on the GOODS-N field with spectroscopic redshifts in the range $z < 3.6$, 2) 14365 galaxies from the COSMOS bright survey with photometric band magnitudes, morphology, and spectroscopic redshifts inside $z < 1.4$, 3) 3048 galaxies from the overlap of COSMOS photometry and morphology with 3D-HST spectroscopy extending to $z < 3.9$, and 4) 2612 galaxies with five-band photometric magnitudes and morphology from the All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey and $z < 1.57$. Results: We find that SPIDER-z achieves results competitive with other empirical packages on the PHAT-1 data, and performs quite well in estimating redshifts with the COSMOS and AEGIS data, including in the cases of a large redshift range ($0 < z < 3.9$). We also determine from analyses with both the COSMOS and AEGIS data that the inclusion of morphological information does not have a statistically significant benefit for photometric redshift estimation with the techniques employed here.
In this work, we studied the impact of galaxy morphology on photometric redshift (photo-$z$) probability density functions (PDFs). By including galaxy morphological parameters like the radius, axis-ratio, surface brightness and the Sersic index in addition to the $ugriz$ broadbands as input parameters, we used the machine learning photo-$z$ algorithm ANNz2 to train and test on galaxies from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Stripe-82 (CS82) Survey. Metrics like the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), probability integral transform (PIT), Bayesian odds parameter, and even the width and height of the PDFs were evaluated, and the results were compared when different number of input parameters were used during the training process. We find improvements in the CRPS and width of the PDFs when galaxy morphology has been added to the training, and the improvement is larger especially when the number of broadband magnitudes are lacking.
Many scientific investigations of photometric galaxy surveys require redshift estimates, whose uncertainty properties are best encapsulated by photometric redshift (photo-z) posterior probability density functions (PDFs). A plethora of photo-z PDF estimation methodologies abound, producing discrepant results with no consensus on a preferred approach. We present the results of a comprehensive experiment comparing twelve photo-z algorithms applied to mock data produced for The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). By supplying perfect prior information, in the form of the complete template library and a representative training set as inputs to each code, we demonstrate the impact of the assumptions underlying each technique on the output photo-z PDFs. In the absence of a notion of true, unbiased photo-z PDFs, we evaluate and interpret multiple metrics of the ensemble properties of the derived photo-z PDFs as well as traditional reductions to photo-z point estimates. We report systematic biases and overall over/under-breadth of the photo-z PDFs of many popular codes, which may indicate avenues for improvement in the algorithms or implementations. Furthermore, we raise attention to the limitations of established metrics for assessing photo-z PDF accuracy; though we identify the conditional density estimate (CDE) loss as a promising metric of photo-z PDF performance in the case where true redshifts are available but true photo-z PDFs are not, we emphasize the need for science-specific performancemetrics.