Papers › Incorporating Measurement Error in Astronomical Object Classification
Incorporating Measurement Error in Astronomical Object Classification
Sarah Shy, Hyungsuk Tak, Eric D. Feigelson, John D. Timlin, G. Jogesh Babu
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Most general-purpose classification methods, such as support-vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), fail to account for an unusual characteristic of astronomical data: known measurement error uncertainties. In astronomical data, this information is often given in the data but discarded because popular machine learning classifiers cannot incorporate it. We propose a simulation-based approach that incorporates heteroscedastic measurement error into existing classification method to better quantify uncertainty in classification. The proposed method first simulates perturbed realizations of the data from a Bayesian posterior predictive distribution of a Gaussian measurement error model. Then, a chosen classifier is fit to each simulation. The variation across the simulations naturally reflects the uncertainty propagated from the measurement errors in both labeled and unlabeled data sets. We demonstrate the use of this approach via two numerical studies. The first is a thorough simulation study applying the proposed procedure to SVM and RF, which are well-known hard and soft classifiers, respectively. The second study is a realistic classification problem of identifying high-z (2.9 ≤z ≤5.1) quasar candidates from photometric data. The data are from merged catalogs of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Spitzer IRAC Equatorial Survey, and the Spitzer-HETDEX Exploratory Large-Area Survey. The proposed approach reveals that out of 11,847 high-z quasar candidates identified by a random forest without incorporating measurement error, 3,146 are potential misclassifications with measurement error. Additionally, out of $1.85$ million objects not identified as high-z quasars without measurement error, 936 can be considered new candidates with measurement error.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections