Finding galaxies in the shadows of quasars with Gaussian processes

  • Roman Garnett
  • , Shirley Ho
  • , Jeff Schneider

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We develop an automated technique for detecting damped Lyman-α absorbers (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 50 000 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 100 000 spectra, with excellent performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2015
EditorsDavid Blei, Francis Bach
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages1025-1033
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781510810587
StatePublished - 2015
Event32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2015 - Lile, France
Duration: Jul 6 2015Jul 11 2015

Publication series

Name32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2015
Volume2

Conference

Conference32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2015
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLile
Period07/6/1507/11/15

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