Papers › Predicting the global far-infrared SED of galaxies via machine learning techniques
Predicting the global far-infrared SED of galaxies via machine learning techniques
W. Dobbels, M. Baes, S. Viaene, S. Bianchi, J. I. Davies, V. Casasola, C. J. R. Clark, J. Fritz, M. Galametz, F. Galliano, A. Mosenkov, A. Nersesian, A. Trčka
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.
Dust plays an important role in shaping a galaxy's spectral energy distribution (SED). It absorbs ultraviolet (UV) to near-infrared (NIR) radiation and re-emits this energy in the far-infrared (FIR). The FIR is essential to understand dust in galaxies. However, deep FIR observations require a space mission, none of which are still active today. We aim to infer the FIR emission across six Herschel bands, along with dust luminosity, mass, and effective temperature, based on the available UV to mid-infrared (MIR) observations. We also want to estimate the uncertainties of these predictions, compare our method to energy balance SED fitting, and determine possible limitations of the model. We propose a machine learning framework to predict the FIR fluxes from 14 UV-MIR broadband fluxes. We used a low redshift sample by combining DustPedia and H-ATLAS, and extracted Bayesian flux posteriors through SED fitting. We trained shallow neural networks to predict the far-infrared fluxes, uncertainties, and dust properties. We evaluated them on a test set using a root mean square error (RMSE) in log-space. Our results (RMSE = 0.19 dex) significantly outperform UV-MIR energy balance SED fitting (RMSE = 0.38 dex), and are inherently unbiased. We can identify when the predictions are off, for example when the input has large uncertainties on WISE 22, or when the input does not resemble the training set. The galaxies for which we have UV-FIR observations can be used as a blueprint for galaxies that lack FIR data. This results in a 'virtual FIR telescope', which can be applied to large optical-MIR galaxy samples. This helps bridge the gap until the next FIR mission.
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