No Arabic abstract
We aim to select quasar candidates based on the two large survey databases, Pan-STARRS and AllWISE. Exploring the distribution of quasars and stars in the color spaces, we find that the combination of infrared and optical photometry is more conducive to select quasar candidates. Two new color criterions (yW1W2 and izW1W2) are constructed to distinguish quasars from stars efficiently. With izW1W2, 98.30% of star contamination is eliminated, while 99.50% of quasars are retained, at least to the magnitude limit of our training set of stars. Based on the optical and infrared color features, we put forward an efficient schema to select quasar candidates and high redshift quasar candidates, in which two machine learning algorithms (XGBoost and SVM) are implemented. The XGBoost and SVM classifiers have proven to be very effective with accuracy of 99.46% when 8Color as input pattern and default model parameters. Applying the two optimal classifiers to the unknown Pan-STARRS and AllWISE cross-matched data set, a total of 2,006,632 intersected sources are predicted to be quasar candidates given quasar probability larger than 0.5 (i.e. P_QSO>0.5). Among them, 1,201,211 have high probability (P_QSO>0.95). For these newly predicted quasar candidates, a regressor is constructed to estimate their redshifts. Finally 7,402 z>3.5 quasars are obtained. Given the magnitude limitation and site of the LAMOST telescope, part of these candidates will be used as the input catalogue of the LAMOST telescope for follow-up observation, and the rest may be observed by other telescopes.
We present a new QSO selection algorithm using a Support Vector Machine (SVM), a supervised classification method, on a set of extracted times series features including period, amplitude, color, and autocorrelation value. We train a model that separates QSOs from variable stars, non-variable stars and microlensing events using 58 known QSOs, 1,629 variable stars and 4,288 non-variables using the MAssive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) database as a training set. To estimate the efficiency and the accuracy of the model, we perform a cross-validation test using the training set. The test shows that the model correctly identifies ~80% of known QSOs with a 25% false positive rate. The majority of the false positives are Be stars. We applied the trained model to the MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) dataset, which consists of 40 million lightcurves, and found 1,620 QSO candidates. During the selection none of the 33,242 known MACHO variables were misclassified as QSO candidates. In order to estimate the true false positive rate, we crossmatched the candidates with astronomical catalogs including the Spitzer Surveying the Agents of a Galaxys Evolution (SAGE) LMC catalog and a few X-ray catalogs. The results further suggest that the majority of the candidates, more than 70%, are QSOs.
Star Formation Rates or SFRs are crucial to constrain theories of galaxy formation and evolution. SFRs are usually estimated via spectroscopic observations requiring large amounts of telescope time. We explore an alternative approach based on the photometric estimation of global SFRs for large samples of galaxies, by using methods such as automatic parameter space optimisation, and supervised Machine Learning models. We demonstrate that, with such approach, accurate multi-band photometry allows to estimate reliable SFRs. We also investigate how the use of photometric rather than spectroscopic redshifts, affects the accuracy of derived global SFRs. Finally, we provide a publicly available catalogue of SFRs for more than 27 million galaxies extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky survey Data Release 7. The catalogue is available through the Vizier facility at the following link ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/J/MNRAS/486/1377.
We estimated photometric redshifts (zphot) for more than 1.1 million galaxies of the ESO Public Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) Data Release 2. KiDS is an optical wide-field imaging survey carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the OmegaCAM camera, which aims at tackling open questions in cosmology and galaxy evolution, such as the origin of dark energy and the channel of galaxy mass growth. We present a catalogue of photometric redshifts obtained using the Multi Layer Perceptron with Quasi Newton Algorithm (MLPQNA) model, provided within the framework of the DAta Mining and Exploration Web Application REsource (DAMEWARE). These photometric redshifts are based on a spectroscopic knowledge base which was obtained by merging spectroscopic datasets from GAMA (Galaxy And Mass Assembly) data release 2 and SDSS-III data release 9. The overall 1 sigma uncertainty on Delta z = (zspec - zphot) / (1+ zspec) is ~ 0.03, with a very small average bias of ~ 0.001, a NMAD of ~ 0.02 and a fraction of catastrophic outliers (| Delta z | > 0.15) of ~0.4%.
The advancement of technology has resulted in a rapid increase in supernova (SN) discoveries. The Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) transient survey, conducted from fall 2016 through spring 2017, yielded 1824 SN candidates. This gave rise to the need for fast type classification for spectroscopic follow-up and prompted us to develop a machine learning algorithm using a deep neural network (DNN) with highway layers. This machine is trained by actual observed cadence and filter combinations such that we can directly input the observed data array into the machine without any interpretation. We tested our model with a dataset from the LSST classification challenge (Deep Drilling Field). Our classifier scores an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.996 for binary classification (SN Ia or non-SN Ia) and 95.3% accuracy for three-class classification (SN Ia, SN Ibc, or SN II). Application of our binary classification to HSC transient data yields an AUC score of 0.925. With two weeks of HSC data since the first detection, this classifier achieves 78.1% accuracy for binary classification, and the accuracy increases to 84.2% with the full dataset. This paper discusses the potential use of machine learning for SN type classification purposes.
Photometric redshifts (photo-zs) provide an alternative way to estimate the distances of large samples of galaxies and are therefore crucial to a large variety of cosmological problems. Among the various methods proposed over the years, supervised machine learning (ML) methods capable to interpolate the knowledge gained by means of spectroscopical data have proven to be very effective. METAPHOR (Machine-learning Estimation Tool for Accurate PHOtometric Redshifts) is a novel method designed to provide a reliable PDF (Probability density Function) of the error distribution of photometric redshifts predicted by ML methods. The method is implemented as a modular workflow, whose internal engine for photo-z estimation makes use of the MLPQNA neural network (Multi Layer Perceptron with Quasi Newton learning rule), with the possibility to easily replace the specific machine learning model chosen to predict photo-zs. After a short description of the software, we present a summary of results on public galaxy data (Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Data Release 9) and a comparison with a completely different method based on Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) template fitting.