Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Using Supervised Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Supervised artificial neural networks are used to predict useful properties of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, in this instance morphological classifications, spectral types and redshifts. By giving the trained networks unseen data, it is found that correlations between predicted and actual properties are around 0.9 with rms errors of order ten per cent. Thus, given a representative training set, these properties may be reliably estimated for galaxies in the survey for which there are no spectra and without human intervention.

Submitted to MNRAS; 9 pages; University of Sussex, UK. Postscript containing higher resolution versions of figures 2 and 3 is available at http://www.astronomy.sussex.ac.uk/~kape7/ball_030618_mnras.ps.gz . The figures are also available separately at http://www.astronomy.sussex.ac.uk/~kape7/ball_030618_figure2_mnras.eps.gz and http://www.astronomy.sussex.ac.uk/~kape7/ball_030618_figure3_mnras.eps.gz