Estimating the distribution of Galaxy Morphologies on a continuous space

Abstract

The incredible variety of galaxy shapes cannot be summarized by human defined discrete classes of shapes without causing a possibly large loss of information. Dictionary learning and sparse coding allow us to reduce the high dimensional space of shapes into a manageable low dimensional continuous vector space. Statistical inference can be done in the reduced space via probability distribution estimation and manifold estimation.

4 pages, 3 figures, Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology, Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 306, 2014