Abstract The accurate estimation of photometric redshifts is crucial to many upcoming galaxy surveys, for example, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Almost all Rubin extragalactic and cosmological science requires accurate and precise calculation of photometric redshifts; many diverse approaches to this problem are currently in the process of being developed, validated, and tested. In this work, we use the photometric redshift code GPz to examine two realistically complex training set imperfections scenarios for machine learning based photometric redshift calculation: (i) where the spectroscopic training set has a very different distribution in color–magnitude space to the test set, and (ii) where the effect of emission line confusion causes a fraction of the training spectroscopic sample to not have the true redshift. By evaluating the sensitivity of GPz to a range of increasingly severe imperfections, with a range of metrics (both of photo- z point estimates as well as posterior probability distribution functions, PDFs), we quantify the degree to which predictions get worse with higher degrees of degradation. In particular, we find that there is a substantial drop-off in photo- z quality when line-confusion goes above ∼1%, and sample incompleteness below a redshift of 1.5,more »
Photometric redshifts for quasars from WISE-PS1-STRM
Three-dimensional wide-field galaxy surveys are fundamental for cosmological studies. For higher redshifts (z ≳ 1.0), where galaxies are too faint, quasars still trace the large-scale structure of the Universe. Since available telescope time limits spectroscopic surveys, photometric methods are efficient for estimating redshifts for many quasars. Recently, machine-learning methods are increasingly successful for quasar photometric redshifts, however, they hinge on the distribution of the training set. Therefore, a rigorous estimation of reliability is critical. We extracted optical and infrared photometric data from the cross-matched catalogue of the WISE All-Sky and PS1 3$\pi$ DR2 sky surveys. We trained an XGBoost regressor and an artificial neural network on the relation between colour indices and spectroscopic redshift. We approximated the effective training set coverage with the K-nearest neighbours algorithm. We estimated reliable photometric redshifts of 2 562 878 quasars which overlap with the training set in feature space. We validated the derived redshifts with an independent, clustering-based redshift estimation technique. The final catalogue is publicly available.
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10371571
- Journal Name:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Volume:
- 516
- Issue:
- 2
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- p. 2662-2670
- ISSN:
- 0035-8711
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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