Automatic quantitative morphological analysis of interacting galaxies
  The large number of galaxies imaged by digital sky surveys reinforces the
need for computational methods for analyzing galaxy morphology. While the
morphology of most galaxies can be associated with a stage on the Hubble
sequence, morphology of galaxy mergers is far more complex due to the
combination of two or more galaxies with different morphologies and the
interaction between them. Here we propose a computational method based on
unsupervised machine learning that can quantitatively analyze morphologies of
galaxy mergers and associate galaxies by their morphology. The method works by
first generating multiple synthetic galaxy models for each galaxy merger, and
then extracting a large set of numerical image content descriptors for each
galaxy model. These numbers are weighted using Fisher discriminant scores, and
then the similarities between the galaxy mergers are deduced using a variation
of Weighted Nearest Neighbor analysis such that the Fisher scores are used as
weights. The similarities between the galaxy mergers are visualized using
phylogenies to provide a graph that reflects the morphological similarities
between the different galaxy mergers, and thus quantitatively profile the
morphology of galaxy mergers.
