Analyzing Supervised Machine Learning Models for Classifying Astronomical Objects Using Gaia DR3 Spectral Features

Abstract

In this paper, we present an analysis of the effectiveness of various machine learning algorithms in classifying astronomical objects using data from the third release (DR3) of the Gaia space mission. The dataset used includes spectral information from the satellite’s red and blue spectrophotometers. The primary goal is to achieve reliable classification with high confidence for symbiotic stars, planetary nebulae, and red giants. Symbiotic stars are binary systems formed by a high-temperature star (a white dwarf in most cases) and an evolved star (Mira type or red giant star); their spectra varies between the typical for these objects (depending on the orbital phase of the object) and present emission lines similar to those observed in PN spectra, which is the reason for this first selection. Several classification algorithms are evaluated, including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Naive Bayes classifier. The evaluation is based on different metrics such as Precision, Recall, F1-Score, and the Kappa index. The study confirms the effectiveness of classifying the mentioned stars using only their spectral information. The models trained with Artificial Neural Networks and Random Forest demonstrated superior performance, surpassing an accuracy rate of 94.67%.

Keywords

• automatic spectral classification
• machine learning
• Gaia DR3
• astronomical objects
• planetary nebulae
• symbiotic stars