Detecting Astronomical Objects with Machine Learning

These are the source files used during the writing of the 2020 MSc thesis on "Detecting Astronomical Objects with Machine Learning" by M. P. van de Weerd.

Contents

An attempt has been made to include all materials used during the project. This consists of the following:

• The LaTeX source files used to build the actual thesis document. See the root of this repository.
• Source code used to test the computation of max-tree attributes (also some simple data sets and a max-tree construction algorithm implementation). Written for GNU Octave.
• Source code by Moschini et al. (2014), which has been expanded with new functionality as a result of this project.
• MT Demo by Westenberg, Roerdink and Wilkinson (2007), slightly refactored for readability and mainly used as a reference for the implementation of the three-dimensional invariant moments.
• Source code by Tuschabe (2010), slightly refactored for readability and mainly used as a reference for the computation of some secondary component attributes.
• Related literature by several authors, as well as the ones mentioned above (when digitally available, which is not the case for the PhD thesis by Tushabe). Further distribution of these files should obviously be avoided.

N.b.: in most cases, a source code-specific README.MD has been included in the respective root with more detailed instruction on how to install and operate the software in question.

Thesis Document

A makefile has been provided to allow easy building of the thesis document, the slides of the presentation and the accompanying handouts. However there are some prerequisites that should be met regarding the install of the LaTeX distribution on your machine. The following steps should point you in the right direction.

1. Install the RuG TeX house style classes (by default available on a RuG machine, e.g. via uwp.rug.nl).
2. Install the rugscriptie LaTeX package. This can be done by either unzipping the archive provided there in the root of this project, or by including the source files from the archive in your texmf tree as instructed here. Note that the last option might prove difficult, expecially when trying to getting the Georgia font to work on a Linux machine.
3. Run make to build the documents. Some packages might not be available in your LaTeX distribution. Read the output carefully to determine what they are and install them in any way you like.

The documents are named according to the guidelines provided by the RuG, which includes a year. By default, the year is chosen to be the current year. This can be overidden by overriding the YEAR environment variable when using make, e.g.:

make -e YEAR=2020