COIN-Focus #1: RESSPECT – France – 2019
The Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN) is an international network which aims to create an interdisciplinary environment where collaborations between astronomers, statisticians and machine learning experts can flourish. The group utilizes a management model which can find parallel in technological start-ups: based on a dynamic, non-hierarchical and people-centric approach.
Active Learning with RESSPECT
The Recommendation System for Spectroscopic follow-up (RESSPECT) project aims to enable the construction of optimized training samples for the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), taking into account a realistic description of the astronomical data environment. In this work, we test the robustness of active learning techniques in a realistic simulated astronomical data scenario. Our experiment takes into account the evolution of training and pool samples, different costs per object, and two different sources of budget. Results show that traditional active learning strategies significantly outperform random sampling.
Ridges in the Dark Energy Survey
Cosmic voids play an important role in our attempt to model the large-scale structure of the Universe. In this paper, we apply it to 2D weak-lensing mass density maps to identify curvilinear filamentary structures. Our results demonstrate the viability of ridge estimation as a precursor for denoising weak lensing quantities to recover the large-scale structure, paving the way for a more versatile and effective search for troughs.
Dark energy equation of state imprint on supernova data
This work determines the degree to which a standard Lambda-CDM analysis based on type Ia supernovae can identify deviations from a cosmological constant in the form of a redshift-dependent dark energy equation of state w(z). We demonstrate that a standard type Ia supernova cosmology analysis has limited sensitivity to extensive redshift dependencies of the dark energy equation of state. In addition, we report that larger redshift-dependent departures from a cosmological constant do not necessarily manifest easier-detectable incompatibilities with the Lambda-CDM model.
Active Learning for Supernova Photometric Classification
Active Learning is a class of algorithms that aims to minimize labeling costs by identifying a few, carefully chosen, objects which have high potential in improving a given machine learning classifier. In this project, we show how Active Learning can be used as a tool for optimizing the construction of spectroscopic samples for supernova photometric classification.
Gaussian Mixture Models
Here, we show how to use a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to jointly analyse two traditional emission-line classification schemes of galaxy ionization sources: the Baldwin-Phillips-Terlevich (BPT) and the WHAN diagrams, using spectroscopic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 and SEAGal/STARLIGHT datasets. We apply a GMM to empirically define classes of galaxies in a three-dimensional space spanned by the log [OIII]/H-beta, log [NII]/H-alpha, and log EW(H-alpha) optical parameters. We demonstrate the potential of our methodology to recover/unravel different objects inside the wilderness of astronomical datasets, without lacking the ability to convey physically interpretable results; hence being a precious tool for maximum exploitation of the ever-increasing astronomical surveys.
Dimensionality Reduction And Clustering for Unsupervised Learning in Astronomy (DRACULA)
DRACULA classifies objects using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The code has an easy interface and can be applied to separate several types of objects. It is based on tools developed in scikit-learn, with Deep Learning usage requiring also the H2O package. We show how it can be used to identify sub-classes of type Ia supernovae.