A Conditional Autoencoder for Galaxy Photometric Parameter Estimation
- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (United States); OSTI
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (United States); Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (United States)
Astronomical photometric surveys routinely image billions of galaxies, and traditionally infer the parameters of a parametric model for each galaxy. This approach has served us well, but the computational expense of deriving a full posterior probability distribution function is a challenge for increasingly ambitious surveys. In this paper, we use deep learning methods to characterize galaxy images, training a conditional autoencoder on mock data. The autoencoder can reconstruct and denoise galaxy images via a latent space engineered to include semantically meaningful parameters, such as brightness, location, size, and shape. Our model recovers galaxy fluxes and shapes on mock data with a lower variance than the Hyper Suprime-Cam photometry pipeline, and returns reasonable answers even for inputs outside the range of its training data. When applied to data in the training range, the regression errors on all extracted parameters are nearly unbiased with a variance near the Cramr-Rao bound.
- Research Organization:
- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC); NASA ROSES; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0013718
- OSTI ID:
- 1979376
- Journal Information:
- Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Journal Name: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Journal Issue: 1034 Vol. 134; ISSN 0004-6280
- Publisher:
- Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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