Machine learning based stellar classification with highly sparse photometry data

Identifying stars belonging to different classes is vital in order to build up statistical samples of different phases and pathways of stellar evolution. In the era of surveys covering billions of stars, an automated method of identifying these classes becomes necessary.

Many classes of stars are identified based on their emitted spectra. In this paper, we use a combination of the multi-class multi-label Machine Learning (ML) method XGBoost and the PySSED spectral-energy-distribution fitting algorithm to classify stars into nine different classes, based on their photometric data. The classifier is trained on subsets of the SIMBAD database. Particular challenges are the very high sparsity (large fraction of missing values) of the underlying data as well as the high class imbalance. We discuss the different variables available, such as photometric measurements on the one hand, and indirect predictors such as Galactic position on the other hand.

We show the difference in performance when excluding certain variables, and discuss in which contexts which of the variables should be used. Finally, we show that increasing the number of samples of a particular type of star significantly increases the performance of the model for that particular type, while having little to no impact on other types. The accuracy of the main classifier is ∼0.7 with a macro F1 score of 0.61.

While the current accuracy of the classifier is not high enough to be reliably used in stellar classification, this work is an initial proof of feasibility for using ML to classify stars based on photometry.