Archetypal analysis of galaxy spectra

BHP Chan, DA Mitchell, LE Cram - Monthly Notices of the Royal …, 2003 - academic.oup.com
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2003academic.oup.com
Archetypal analysis represents each individual member of a set of data vectors as a mixture
(a constrained linear combination) of the pure types or archetypes of the data set. The
archetypes are themselves required to be mixtures of the data vectors. Archetypal analysis
may be particularly useful in analysing data sets comprising galaxy spectra, since each
spectrum is, presumably, a superposition of the emission from the various stellar
populations, nebular emissions and nuclear activity making up that galaxy, and each of …
Abstract
Archetypal analysis represents each individual member of a set of data vectors as a mixture (a constrained linear combination) of the pure types or archetypes of the data set. The archetypes are themselves required to be mixtures of the data vectors. Archetypal analysis may be particularly useful in analysing data sets comprising galaxy spectra, since each spectrum is, presumably, a superposition of the emission from the various stellar populations, nebular emissions and nuclear activity making up that galaxy, and each of these emission sources corresponds to a potential archetype of the entire data set. We demonstrate archetypal analysis using sets of composite synthetic galaxy spectra, showing that the method promises to be an effective and efficient way to classify spectra. We show that archetypal analysis is robust in the presence of various types of noise.
Oxford University Press