GPz: Non-stationary sparse Gaussian processes for heteroscedastic uncertainty estimation in photometric redshifts

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Almosallam, Ibrahim A., Jarvis, Matt J., Roberts, Stephen J.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2016
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author Almosallam, Ibrahim A.
Jarvis, Matt J.
Roberts, Stephen J.
author_facet Almosallam, Ibrahim A.
Jarvis, Matt J.
Roberts, Stephen J.
contents The next generation of cosmology experiments will be required to use photometric redshifts rather than spectroscopic redshifts. Obtaining accurate and well-characterized photometric redshift distributions is therefore critical for Euclid, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array. However, determining accurate variance predictions alongside single point estimates is crucial, as they can be used to optimize the sample of galaxies for the specific experiment (e.g. weak lensing, baryon acoustic oscillations, supernovae), trading off between completeness and reliability in the galaxy sample. The various sources of uncertainty in measurements of the photometry and redshifts put a lower bound on the accuracy that any model can hope to achieve. The intrinsic uncertainty associated with estimates is often non-uniform and input-dependent, commonly known in statistics as heteroscedastic noise. However, existing approaches are susceptible to outliers and do not take into account variance induced by non-uniform data density and in most cases require manual tuning of many parameters. In this paper, we present a Bayesian machine learning approach that jointly optimizes the model with respect to both the predictive mean and variance we refer to as Gaussian processes for photometric redshifts (GPz). The predictive variance of the model takes into account both the variance due to data density and photometric noise. Using the SDSS DR12 data, we show that our approach substantially outperforms other machine learning methods for photo-z estimation and their associated variance, such as TPZ and ANNz2. We provide a Matlab and Python implementations that are available to download at https://github.com/OxfordML/GPz .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1604_03593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2016
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GPz: Non-stationary sparse Gaussian processes for heteroscedastic uncertainty estimation in photometric redshifts
Almosallam, Ibrahim A.
Jarvis, Matt J.
Roberts, Stephen J.
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
I.2.6
The next generation of cosmology experiments will be required to use photometric redshifts rather than spectroscopic redshifts. Obtaining accurate and well-characterized photometric redshift distributions is therefore critical for Euclid, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array. However, determining accurate variance predictions alongside single point estimates is crucial, as they can be used to optimize the sample of galaxies for the specific experiment (e.g. weak lensing, baryon acoustic oscillations, supernovae), trading off between completeness and reliability in the galaxy sample. The various sources of uncertainty in measurements of the photometry and redshifts put a lower bound on the accuracy that any model can hope to achieve. The intrinsic uncertainty associated with estimates is often non-uniform and input-dependent, commonly known in statistics as heteroscedastic noise. However, existing approaches are susceptible to outliers and do not take into account variance induced by non-uniform data density and in most cases require manual tuning of many parameters. In this paper, we present a Bayesian machine learning approach that jointly optimizes the model with respect to both the predictive mean and variance we refer to as Gaussian processes for photometric redshifts (GPz). The predictive variance of the model takes into account both the variance due to data density and photometric noise. Using the SDSS DR12 data, we show that our approach substantially outperforms other machine learning methods for photo-z estimation and their associated variance, such as TPZ and ANNz2. We provide a Matlab and Python implementations that are available to download at https://github.com/OxfordML/GPz .
title GPz: Non-stationary sparse Gaussian processes for heteroscedastic uncertainty estimation in photometric redshifts
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03593