arXiv research

The goal of this study is to present the development of a machine learning based approach that utilizes phase space alone to separate the Gaia DR2 stars into two categories: those accreted onto the Milky Way from those that are in situ. Traditional selection methods that have been used to identify accreted stars typica…

Paper uses machine learning to detect dark matter subhalos in simulated Gaia DR2 data.

We demonstrate an algorithm for learning a flexible color-magnitude diagram from noisy parallax and photometry measurements using a normalizing flow, a deep neural network capable of learning an arbitrary multi-dimensional probability distribution. We present a catalog of 640M photometric distance posteriors to nearby …

3D dust map of the Milky Way improves resolution and accuracy.

We develop and demonstrate a probabilistic method for classifying rare objects in surveys with the particular goal of building very pure samples. It works by modifying the output probabilities from a classifier so as to accommodate our expectation (priors) concerning the relative frequencies of different classes of obj…

Designing a photometric system to best fulfil a set of scientific goals is a complex task, demanding a compromise between conflicting requirements and subject to various constraints. A specific example is the determination of stellar astrophysical parameters (APs) - effective temperature, metallicity etc. - across a wi…

Gaia will obtain astrometry and spectrophotometry for essentially all sources in the sky down to a broad band magnitude limit of G=20, an expected yield of 10^9 stars. Its main scientific objective is to reveal the formation and evolution of our Galaxy through chemo-dynamical analysis. In addition to inferring position…

I introduce an algorithm for estimating parameters from multidimensional data based on forward modelling. In contrast to many machine learning approaches it avoids fitting an inverse model and the problems associated with this. The algorithm makes explicit use of the sensitivities of the data to the parameters, with th…

The Extreme Deconvolution method fits a probability density to a dataset where each observation has Gaussian noise added with a known sample-specific covariance, originally intended for use with astronomical datasets. The existing fitting method is batch EM, which would not normally be applied to large datasets such as…

We present a neural network architecture based upon the Autoencoder (AE) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that promotes a convex latent distribution by training adversarially on latent space interpolations. By using an AE as both the generator and discriminator of a GAN, we pass a pixel-wise error function acro…

InfoTree improves reinforcement learning by optimizing tool use with a greedy submodular approach.