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We present a novel natural language processing (NLP) approach to deriving plain English descriptors for science cases otherwise restricted by obfuscating technical terminology. We address the limitations of common radio galaxy morphology classifications by applying this approach. We experimentally derive a set of semantic tags for the Radio Galaxy Zoo EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) project and the wider astronomical community. We collect 8486 plain English annotations of radio galaxy morphology, from which we derive a taxonomy of tags. The tags are plain English. The result is an extensible framework, which is more flexible, more easily communicated, and more sensitive to rare feature combinations, which are indescribable using the current framework of radio astronomy classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) large-area radio continuum survey will detect tens of millions of radio galaxies, giving an opportunity for the detection of previously unknown classes of objects. To maximize the scientific value and make new discoveries, the analysis of these data will need to go beyond simple visual inspection. We propose the coarse-grained complexity, a simple scalar quantity relating to the minimum description length of an image that can be used to identify unusual structures. The complexity can be computed without reference to the broader sample or existing catalogue data, making the computation efficient on new surveys at very large scales (such as the full EMU survey). We apply our coarse-grained complexity measure to data from the EMU Pilot Survey to detect and confirm anomalous objects in this data set and produce an anomaly catalogue. Rather than work with existing catalogue data using a specific source detection algorithm, we perform a blind scan of the area, computing the complexity using a sliding square aperture. The effectiveness of the complexity measure for identifying anomalous objects is evaluated using crowd-sourced labels generated via the Zooniverse.org platform. We find that the complexity scan identifies unusual sources, such as odd radio circles, by partitioning on complexity. We achieve partitions where 5 per cent of the data is estimated to be 86 per cent complete, and 0.5 per cent is estimated to be 94 per cent pure, with respect to anomalies and use this to produce an anomaly catalogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we examine the classification accuracy and robustness of a state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applied to the morphological classification of radio galaxies. We test if SSL with fewer labels can achieve test accuracies comparable to the supervised state of the art and whether this holds when incorporating previously unseen data. We find that for the radio galaxy classification problem considered, SSL provides additional regularization and outperforms the baseline test accuracy. However, in contrast to model performance metrics reported on computer science benchmarking data sets, we find that improvement is limited to a narrow range of label volumes, with performance falling off rapidly at low label volumes. Additionally, we show that SSL does not improve model calibration, regardless of whether classification is improved. Moreover, we find that when different underlying catalogues drawn from the same radio survey are used to provide the labelled and unlabelled data sets required for SSL, a significant drop in classification performance is observed, highlighting the difficulty of applying SSL techniques under data set shift. We show that a class-imbalanced unlabelled data pool negatively affects performance through prior probability shift, which we suggest may explain this performance drop, and that using the Fréchet distance between labelled and unlabelled data sets as a measure of data set shift can provide a prediction of model performance, but that for typical radio galaxy data sets with labelled sample volumes of |$\mathcal {O}(10^3)$|⁠ , the sample variance associated with this technique is high and the technique is in general not sufficiently robust to replace a train–test cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a model for generating postage stamp images of synthetic Fanaroff–Riley Class I and Class II radio galaxies suitable for use in simulations of future radio surveys such as those being developed for the Square Kilometre Array. This model uses a fully connected neural network to implement structured variational inference through a variational autoencoder and decoder architecture. In order to optimize the dimensionality of the latent space for the autoencoder, we introduce the radio morphology inception score (RAMIS), a quantitative method for assessing the quality of generated images, and discuss in detail how data pre-processing choices can affect the value of this measure. We examine the 2D latent space of the VAEs and discuss how this can be used to control the generation of synthetic populations, whilst also cautioning how it may lead to biases when used for data augmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The upcoming next-generation large area radio continuum surveys can expect tens of millions of radio sources, rendering the traditional method for radio morphology classification through visual inspection unfeasible. We present Claran — C la ssifying R adio sources A utomatically with N eural networks — a proof-of-concept radio source morphology classifier based upon the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neutral Networks method. Specifically, we train and test Claran on the FIRST and WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) images from the Radio Galaxy Zoo Data Release 1 catalogue. Claran provides end users with automated identification of radio source morphology classifications from a simple input of a radio image and a counterpart infrared image of the same region. Claran is the first open-source, end-to-end radio source morphology classifier that is capable of locating and associating discrete and extended components of radio sources in a fast (<200 ms per image) and accurate (≥90 per cent) fashion. Future work will improve Claran 's relatively lower success rates in dealing with multisource fields and will enable Claran to identify sources on much larger fields without loss in classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]