Galaxies on graph neural networks: towards robust synthetic galaxy catalogs with deep generative models
Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: The future astronomical imaging surveys are set to provide precise constraints on cosmological parameters, such as dark energy. However, production of synthetic data for these surveys, to test and validate analysis methods, suffers from a very high computational cost. In particular, generating mock galaxy catalogs at sufficiently large volume and high resolution will soon become computationally unreachable. In this paper, we address this problem with a Deep Generative Model to create robust mock galaxy catalogs that may be used to test and develop the analysis pipelines of future weak lensing surveys. We build our model on a custom built Graph Convolutional Networks, by placing each galaxy on a graph node and then connecting the graphs within each gravitationally bound system. We train our model on a cosmological simulation with realistic galaxy populations to capture the 2D and 3D orientations of galaxies. The samples from the model exhibit comparable statistical properties to those in the simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of a generative model on graphs in an astrophysical/cosmological context.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Jagvaral, Yesukhei, Lanusse, Francois, Singh, Sukhdeep, Mandelbaum, Rachel, Ravanbakhsh, Siamak, Campbell, Duncan
Institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, Université Paris-Saclay, Astrophysique, Instrumentation et Modélisation, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Université Paris Diderot, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4311427496