Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Reproducible K-Means Clustering In Galaxy Feature Data From The Gama Survey, Sebastian Turner, Lee S. Kelvin, Ivan K. Baldry, Paulo J. Lisboa, Steven N. Longmore, Chris A. Collins, Benne W. Holwerda, Andrew M. Hopkins, Jochen Liske

Faculty Scholarship

A fundamental bimodality of galaxies in the local Universe is apparent in many of the features used to describe them. Multiple sub-populations exist within this framework, each representing galaxies following distinct evolutionary pathways. Accurately identifying and characterizing these sub-populations requires that a large number of galaxy features be analysed simultaneously. Future galaxy surveys such as LSST and Euclid will yield data volumes for which traditional approaches to galaxy classification will become unfeasible. To address this, we apply a robust k-means unsupervized clustering method to feature data derived from a sample of 7338 local-Universe galaxies selected from the Galaxy And Mass …