Andy D. Goulding

D. Huppenkothen, M. Ntampaka, M. Ho et al. · princeton

Machine learning has rapidly become a tool of choice for the astronomical community. It is being applied across a wide range of wavelengths and problems, from the classification of transients to neural network emulators of cosmological simulations, and is shifting paradigms about how we generate and report scientific results. At the same time, this class of method comes with its own set of best practices, challenges, and drawbacks, which, at present, are often reported on incompletely in the astrophysical literature. With this paper, we aim to provide a primer to the astronomical community, including authors, reviewers, and editors, on how to implement machine learning models and report their results in a way that ensures the accuracy of the results, reproducibility of the findings, and usefulness of the method.

Christian K. Jespersen, Peter Melchior, David N. Spergel et al.

Galaxies are often modelled as composites of separable components with distinct spectral signatures, implying that different wavelength ranges are only weakly correlated. They are not. We present a data-driven model which exploits subtle correlations between physical processes to accurately predict infrared (IR) WISE photometry from a neural summary of optical SDSS spectra. The model achieves accuracies of $χ^2_N \approx 1$ for all photometric bands in WISE, as well as good colors. We are also able to tightly constrain typically IR-derived properties, e.g. the bolometric luminosities of AGN and dust parameters such as $\mathrm{q_{PAH}}$. We find that current SED-fitting methods are incapable of making comparable predictions, and that model misspecification often leads to correlated biases in star-formation rates and AGN luminosities. To help improve SED models, we determine what features of the optical spectrum are responsible for our improved predictions, and identify several lines (CaII, SrII, FeI, [OII] and H$α$), which point to the complex chronology of star formation and chemical enrichment being incorrectly modelled.