Analyzing astronomical data with machine learning techniques

Abstract

Classification is a popular task in the field of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and it happens when outputs are categorical variables. There are a wide variety of models that attempt to draw some conclusions from observed values, so classification algorithms predict categorical class labels for use in classifying new data. Popular classification models including logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron, naive bayes, neural networks have proven to be efficient and accurate applied to many industrial and scientific problems. Particularly, application of ML to astronomy has shown to be very useful for classification, clustering and data cleaning. It is because after learning computers, these tasks can be done automatically by them in a more precise and more rapid way than human operators. In view of this, in this paper, we will review some of these popular classification algorithms, and then we apply some of them to the observational data of nonvariable and the RR Lyrae variable stars that come from the SDSS survey. For the sake of comparison, we calculate the accuracy and $F1$-score of the applied models.