Unsupervised feature-learning for galaxy SEDs with denoising
  autoencoders
  With the increasing number of deep multi-wavelength galaxy surveys, the
spectral energy distribution (SED) of galaxies has become an invaluable tool
for studying the formation of their structures and their evolution. In this
context, standard analysis relies on simple spectro-photometric selection
criteria based on a few SED colors. If this fully supervised classification
already yielded clear achievements, it is not optimal to extract relevant
information from the data. In this article, we propose to employ very recent
advances in machine learning, and more precisely in feature learning, to derive
a data-driven diagram. We show that the proposed approach based on denoising
autoencoders recovers the bi-modality in the galaxy population in an
unsupervised manner, without using any prior knowledge on galaxy SED
classification. This technique has been compared to principal component
analysis (PCA) and to standard color/color representations. In addition,
preliminary results illustrate that this enables the capturing of extra
physically meaningful information, such as redshift dependence, galaxy mass
evolution and variation over the specific star formation rate. PCA also results
in an unsupervised representation with physical properties, such as mass and
sSFR, although this representation separates out. less other characteristics
(bimodality, redshift evolution) than denoising autoencoders.
