Photometric identification of blue horizontal branch stars^⋆

¹ Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), Königstuhl 17, Heidelberg 69117, Germany
e-mail: smith@mpia-hd.mpg.de
² The National Astronomical Observatories, CAS, 20A Datun Road, Chaoyang District, 100012, Beijing, PR China

Received: 8 March 2010
Accepted: 26 July 2010

Abstract

We investigate the performance of some common machine learning techniques in identifying blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars from photometric data. To train the machine learning algorithms, we use previously published spectroscopic identifications of BHB stars from Sloan digital sky survey (SDSS) data. We investigate the performance of three different techniques, namely k nearest neighbour classification, kernel density estimation for discriminant analysis and a support vector machine (SVM). We discuss the performance of the methods in terms of both completeness (what fraction of input BHB stars are successfully returned as BHB stars) and contamination (what fraction of contaminating sources end up in the output BHB sample). We discuss the prospect of trading off these values, achieving lower contamination at the expense of lower completeness, by adjusting probability thresholds for the classification. We also discuss the role of prior probabilities in the classification performance, and we assess via simulations the reliability of the dataset used for training. Overall it seems that no-prior gives the best completeness, but adopting a prior lowers the contamination. We find that the support vector machine generally delivers the lowest contamination for a given level of completeness, and so is our method of choice. Finally, we classify a large sample of SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7) photometry using the SVM trained on the spectroscopic sample. We identify 27 074 probable BHB stars out of a sample of 294 652 stars. We derive photometric parallaxes and demonstrate that our results are reasonable by comparing to known distances for a selection of globular clusters. We attach our classifications, including probabilities, as an electronic table, so that they can be used either directly as a BHB star catalogue, or as priors to a spectroscopic or other classification method. We also provide our final models so that they can be directly applied to new data.