The Classification of Galaxy Morphology in H-band of COSMOS-DASH Field: a combination-based machine learning clustering model

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive galaxy morphology catalog for the COSMOS-DASH field using a novel combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, achieving reliable classification of over 17,000 galaxies.

Contribution

The study introduces a two-step machine learning scheme combining clustering and deep learning for galaxy morphology classification, improving completeness and accuracy.

Findings

Successfully classified 48\% of galaxies with clustering

Galaxy morphologies correlate with Sersic index and effective radius

Galaxies are well separated in G--M20 space

Abstract

By applying our previously developed two-step scheme for galaxy morphology classification, we present a catalog of galaxy morphology for H-band selected massive galaxies in the COSMOS-DASH field, which includes 17292 galaxies with stellar mass $M_{\star}>10^{10}~M_{\odot}$ at $0.5<z<2.5$. The classification scheme is designed to provide a complete morphology classification for galaxies via a combination of two machine-learning steps. We first use an unsupervised machine learning method (i.e., bagging-based multi-clustering) to cluster galaxies into five categories: spherical (SPH), early-type disk (ETD), late-type disk (LTD), irregular (IRR), and unclassified (UNC). About 48\% of galaxies (8258/17292) are successfully clustered during this step. For the remaining sample, we adopt a supervised machine learning method (i.e., GoogLeNet) to classify them, during which galaxies that are well-classified in the previous step are taken as our training set. Consequently, we obtain a morphology classification result for the full sample. The t-SNE test shows that galaxies in our sample can be well aggregated. We also measure the parametric and nonparametric morphologies of these galaxies. We find that the S\'{e}rsic index increases from IRR to SPH and the effective radius decreases from IRR to SPH, consistent with the corresponding definitions. Galaxies from different categories are separately distributed in the $G$--$M_{20}$ space. Such consistencies with other characteristic descriptions of galaxy morphology demonstrate the reliability of our classification result, ensuring that it can be used as a basic catalog for further galaxy studies.