outlier detection algorithm for SDSS galaxies Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Baron D.
  2. Poznanski D.
  3. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

How can we discover objects we did not know existed within the large data sets that now abound in astronomy? We present an outlier detection algorithm that we developed, based on an unsupervised Random Forest. We test the algorithm on more than two million galaxy spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and examine the 400 galaxies with the highest outlier score. We find objects which have extreme emission line ratios and abnormally strong absorption lines, objects with unusual continua, including extremely reddened galaxies. We find galaxy-galaxy gravitational lenses, double-peaked emission line galaxies and close galaxy pairs. We find galaxies with high ionization lines, galaxies that host supernovae and galaxies with unusual gas kinematics. Only a fraction of the outliers we find were reported by previous studies that used specific and tailored algorithms to find a single class of unusual objects. Our algorithm is general and detects all of these classes, and many more, regardless of what makes them peculiar. It can be executed on imaging, time series and other spectroscopic data, operates well with thousands of features, is not sensitive to missing values and is easily parallelizable.

Keywords
  1. galaxies
  2. catalogs
  3. redshifted
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2017MNRAS.465.4530B
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/465/4530
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/465/4530
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.74654530

Access

Web browser access HTML
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/465/4530
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/465/4530
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/465/4530
IVOA Table Access TAP
https://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).

History

2019-09-12T14:49:15Z
Resource record created
2019-09-12T14:49:15Z
Created
2024-08-16T20:20:22Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr