A catalogue of complex radio sources in the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey created using a Self-Organising Map

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel catalogue of complex radio sources from the RACS survey, using Self-Organising Maps to classify source morphologies efficiently and reliably, facilitating large-scale radio source analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a SOM-based method for classifying radio source morphologies in large surveys, with a publicly available catalogue and reliability assessment.

Findings

79% of sources have >90% reliability in morphology labels

Reliability decreases with Euclidean distance beyond 7

Catalogue of complex sources with SOM-derived labels will be publicly released

Abstract

Next generations of radio surveys are expected to identify tens of millions of new sources, and identifying and classifying their morphologies will require novel and more efficient methods. Self-Organising Maps (SOMs), a type of unsupervised machine learning, can be used to address this problem. We map 251,259 multi-Gaussian sources from Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) onto a SOM with discrete neurons. Similarity metrics, such as Euclidean distances, can be used to identify the best-matching neuron or unit (BMU) for each input image. We establish a reliability threshold by visually inspecting a subset of input images and their corresponding BMU. We label the individual neurons based on observed morphologies and these labels are included in our value-added catalogue of RACS sources. Sources for which the Euclidean distance to their BMU is $\lesssim$ 5 (accounting for approximately 79$\%$ of sources) have an estimated $>90\%$ reliability for their SOM-derived morphological labels. This reliability falls to less than 70$\%$ at Euclidean distances $\gtrsim$ 7. Beyond this threshold it is unlikely that the morphological label will accurately describe a given source. Our catalogue of complex radio sources from RACS with their SOM-derived morphological labels from this work will be made publicly available.