A support vector machine to search for metal-poor galaxies

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Abstract

To develop a fast and reliable method for selecting metal-poor galaxies (MPGs), especially in large surveys and huge data bases, a support vector machine (SVM) supervized learning algorithms is applied to a sample of star-forming galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 9 provided by the Max Planck Institute and the Johns Hopkins University (http://www.sdss3.org/dr9/spectro/spectroaccess.php). A two-step approach is adopted: (i) the SVM must be trained with a subset of objects that are known to be either MPGs or metal-rich galaxies (MRGs), treating the strong emission line flux measurements as input feature vectors in n-dimensional space, where n is the number of strong emission line flux ratios. (ii) After training on a sample of star-forming galaxies, the remaining galaxies are classified in the automatic test analysis as either MPGs or MRGs using a 10-fold cross-validation technique. For target selection, we have achieved an acquisition accuracy for MPGs of ˜96 and ˜95 per cent for an MPG threshold of 12 + log(O/H) = 8.00 and 12 + log(O/H) = 8.39, respectively. Running the code takes minutes in most cases under the MATLAB 2013a software environment. The code in the Letter is available on the web (http://fshi5388.blog.163.com). The SVM method can easily be extended to any MPGs target selection task and can be regarded as an efficient classification method particularly suitable for modern large surveys.

Author

Shi, Fei; Liu, Yu-Yan; Kong, Xu; Chen, Yang; Li, Zhong-Hua; Zhi, Shu-Teng

Journal

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters

Paper Publication Date

October 2014

Paper Type

Astrostatistics