Multi-Epoch Machine Learning 1: Unravelling Nature vs Nurture for Galaxy Formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning model using extremely randomized trees to predict baryonic properties of dark matter subhalos from simulations, revealing nurture's dominant role over nature in galaxy properties.

Contribution

The study develops a novel ERT-based model trained on IllustrisTNG data, outperforming previous models and providing insights into the physical drivers of galaxy properties.

Findings

Model significantly outperforms baseline and mass-history models.

Feature importance varies across properties, indicating different physical influences.

Galaxies' properties are primarily driven by nurture, with some properties influenced by nature.

Abstract

We present a novel machine learning method for predicting the baryonic properties of dark matter only subhalos from N-body simulations. Our model is built using the extremely randomized tree (ERT) algorithm and takes subhalo properties over a wide range of redshifts as its input features. We train our model using the IllustrisTNG simulations to predict blackhole mass, gas mass, magnitudes, star formation rate, stellar mass, and metallicity. We compare the results of our method with a baseline model from previous works, and against a model that only considers the mass history of the subhalo. We find that our new model significantly outperforms both of the other models. We then investigate the predictive power of each input by looking at feature importance scores from the ERT algorithm. We produce feature importance plots for each baryonic property, and find that they differ significantly. We identify low redshifts as being most important for predicting star formation rate and gas mass, with high redshifts being most important for predicting stellar mass and metallicity, and consider what this implies for nature vs nurture. We find that the physical properties of galaxies investigated in this study are all driven by nurture and not nature. The only property showing a somewhat stronger impact of nature is the present-day star formation rate of galaxies. Finally we verify that the feature importance plots are discovering physical patterns, and that the trends shown are not an artefact of the ERT algorithm.