The imbalanced problem in morphological galaxy classification

Abstract

In this paper we present an experimental study of the performance of six machine learning algorithms applied to morphological galaxy classification. We also address the learning approach from imbalanced data sets, inherent to many real-world applications, such as astronomical data analysis problems. We used two over-sampling techniques: SMOTE and Resampling, and we vary the amount of generated instances for classification. Our experimental results show that the learning method Random Forest with Resampling obtain the best results for three, five and seven galaxy types, with a F-measure about .99 for all cases. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.