ICML 2015poster5 citations

Finding Galaxies in the Shadows of Quasars with Gaussian Processes

Roman Garnett, Shirley Ho, Jeff Schneider

Abstract

We develop an automated technique for detecting damped Lyman-αabsorbers (DLAs) along spectroscopic sightlines to quasi-stellar objects (QSOs or quasars). The detection of DLAs in large-scale spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS–III is critical to address outstanding cosmological questions, such as the nature of galaxy formation. We use nearly 50000 QSO spectra to learn a tailored Gaussian process model for quasar emission spectra, which we apply to the DLA detection problem via Bayesian model selection. We demonstrate our method’s effectiveness with a large-scale validation experiment on over 100000 spectra, with excellent performance.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v37-garnett15,
  title = 	 {Finding Galaxies in the Shadows of Quasars with Gaussian Processes},
  author = 	 {Garnett, Roman and Ho, Shirley and Schneider, Jeff},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {1025--1033},
  year = 	 {2015},
  editor = 	 {Bach, Francis and Blei, David},
  volume = 	 {37},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  address = 	 {Lille, France},
  month = 	 {07--09 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/garnett15.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/garnett15.html},
  abstract = 	 {We develop an automated technique for detecting damped Lyman-αabsorbers (DLAs) along spectroscopic sightlines to quasi-stellar objects (QSOs or quasars). The detection of DLAs in large-scale spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS–III is critical to address outstanding cosmological questions, such as the nature of galaxy formation. We use nearly 50000 QSO spectra to learn a tailored Gaussian process model for quasar emission spectra, which we apply to the DLA detection problem via Bayesian model selection. We demonstrate our method’s effectiveness with a large-scale validation experiment on over 100000 spectra, with excellent performance.}
}