Deep learning for supernovae detection

Amar, Gilad

Deep learning for supernovae detection

Master Thesis

2017

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Cosmology and Gravity Group

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

In future astronomical sky surveys it will be humanly impossible to classify the tens of thousands of candidate transients detected per night. This thesis explores the potential of using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to handle this burden more accurately and quickly than trained astronomers. To this end Deep Learning methods are applied to classify transients using real-world data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Using cutting-edge training techniques several Convolutional Neural networks are trained and hyper-parameters tuned to outperform previous approaches and find that human labelling errors are the primary obstacle to further improvement. The tuning and optimisation of the deep models took in excess of 700 hours on a 4-Titan X GPU cluster.

Keywords

Applied Mathematics

Astronomy

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