Abstract The massive photometric data collected from multiple large-scale sky surveys offer significant opportunities for measuring distances of celestial objects by photometric redshifts. However, catastrophic failure is an unsolved problem with a long history and it still exists in the current photometric redshift estimation approaches (such as the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm). In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage approach by integration of KNN and support vector machine (SVM) methods together. In the first stage, we apply the KNN algorithm to photometric data and estimate their corresponding zphot. Our analysis has found two dense regions with catastrophic failure, one in the range of zphot ∈ [0.3, 1.2] and the other in the range of zphot ∈ [1.2, 2.1]. In the second stage, we map the photometric input pattern of points falling into the two ranges from their original attribute space into a high dimensional feature space by using a Gaussian kernel function from an SVM. In the high dimensional feature space, many outliers resulting from catastrophic failure by simple Euclidean distance computation in KNN can be identified by a classification hyperplane of SVM and can be further corrected. Experimental results based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasar data show that the two-stage fusion approach can significantly mitigate catastrophic failure and improve the estimation accuracy of photometric redshifts of quasars. The percents in different |∆z| ranges and root mean square (rms) error by the integrated method are 83.47%, 89.83%, 90.90% and 0.192, respectively, compared to the results by KNN (71.96%, 83.78%, 89.73% and 0.204).
Keywords catalogs — galaxies: distances and redshifts — methods: statistical — quasars: general — surveys — techniques: photometric
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