Photometric identification of blue horizontal branch stars

TL;DR

This paper evaluates machine learning techniques for identifying blue horizontal branch stars from photometric data, comparing their performance and applying the best method to classify a large SDSS dataset.

Contribution

It introduces a support vector machine approach for BHB star classification and provides a comprehensive analysis of method performance and application to large survey data.

Findings

SVM yields lowest contamination at given completeness

No-prior approach maximizes completeness, prior reduces contamination

Identified over 27,000 probable BHB stars in SDSS DR7

Abstract

We investigate the performance of some common machine learning techniques in identifying BHB stars from photometric data. To train the machine learning algorithms, we use previously published spectroscopic identifications of BHB stars from SDSS data. We investigate the performance of three different techniques, namely k nearest neighbour classification, kernel density estimation and a support vector machine (SVM). We discuss the performance of the methods in terms of both completeness and contamination. We discuss the prospect of trading off these values, achieving lower contamination at the expense of lower completeness, by adjusting probability thresholds for the classification. We also discuss the role of prior probabilities in the classification performance, and we assess via simulations the reliability of the dataset used for training. Overall it seems that no-prior gives the best completeness, but adopting a prior lowers the contamination. We find that the SVM generally delivers the lowest contamination for a given level of completeness, and so is our method of choice. Finally, we classify a large sample of SDSS DR7 photometry using the SVM trained on the spectroscopic sample. We identify 27,074 probable BHB stars out of a sample of 294,652 stars. We derive photometric parallaxes and demonstrate that our results are reasonable by comparing to known distances for a selection of globular clusters. We attach our classifications, including probabilities, as an electronic table, so that they can be used either directly as a BHB star catalogue, or as priors to a spectroscopic or other classification method. We also provide our final models so that they can be directly applied to new data.