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Galaxy Classifications with Deep Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

Vesna Lukic
Affiliation:
Hamburger Sternwarte, University of Hamburg, Gojenbergsweg 112, 21029, Hamburg, Germany email: Vesna.Lukic@hs.uni-hamburg.de, Marcus.Brueggen@hs.uni-hamburg.de
Marcus Brüggen
Affiliation:
Hamburger Sternwarte, University of Hamburg, Gojenbergsweg 112, 21029, Hamburg, Germany email: Vesna.Lukic@hs.uni-hamburg.de, Marcus.Brueggen@hs.uni-hamburg.de
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Abstract

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Machine learning techniques have proven to be increasingly useful in astronomical applications over the last few years, for example in object classification, estimating redshifts and data mining. One example of object classification is classifying galaxy morphology. This is a tedious task to do manually, especially as the datasets become larger with surveys that have a broader and deeper search-space. The Kaggle Galaxy Zoo competition presented the challenge of writing an algorithm to find the probability that a galaxy belongs in a particular class, based on SDSS optical spectroscopy data. The use of convolutional neural networks (convnets), proved to be a popular solution to the problem, as they have also produced unprecedented classification accuracies in other image databases such as the database of handwritten digits (MNIST ) and large database of images (CIFAR ). We experiment with the convnets that comprised the winning solution, but using broad classifications. The effect of changing the number of layers is explored, as well as using a different activation function, to help in developing an intuition of how the networks function and to see how they can be applied to radio galaxy images.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2017 

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