Quasar Detection using Linear Support Vector Machine with Learning From Mistakes Methodology

Abstract

The field of Astronomy requires the collection and assimilation of vast volumes of data. The data handling and processing problem has become severe as the sheer volume of data produced by scientific instruments each night grows exponentially. This problem becomes extensive for conventional methods of processing the data, which was mostly manual, but is the perfect setting for the use of Machine Learning approaches. While building classifiers for Astronomy, the cost of losing a rare object like supernovae or quasars to detection losses is far more severe than having many false positives, given the rarity and scientific value of these objects. In this paper, a Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) is explored to detect Quasars, which are extremely bright objects in which a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a luminous accretion disk. In Astronomy, it is vital to correctly identify quasars, as they are very rare in nature. Their rarity creates a class-imbalance problem that needs to be taken into consideration. The class-imbalance problem and high cost of misclassification are taken into account while designing the classifier. To achieve this detection, a novel classifier is explored, and its performance is evaluated. It was observed that LSVM along with Ensemble Bagged Trees (EBT) achieved a 10x reduction in the False Negative Rate, using the Learning from Mistakes methodology.