Context. Galaxies are strongly influenced by their environment. Quantifying the galaxy density is a difficult but critical step in studying the properties of galaxies. Aims. We aim to determine differences in density estimation methods and their applicability in astronomical problems. We study the performance of four density estimation techniques: k-nearest neighbors (kNN), adaptive Gaussian kernel density estimation (DEDICA), a special case of adaptive Epanechnikov kernel density estimation (MBE), and the Delaunay tessellation field estimator (DTFE). Methods. The density estimators are applied to six artificial datasets and on three astronomical datasets, the Millennium Simulation and two samples from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We compare the performance of the methods in two ways: first, by measuring the integrated squared error and Kullback-Leibler divergence of each of the methods with the parametric densities of the datasets (in case of the artificial datasets); second, by examining the applicability of the densities to study the properties of galaxies in relation to their environment (for the SDSS datasets). Results. The adaptive kernel based methods, especially MBE, perform better than the other methods in terms of calculating the density properly and have stronger predictive power in astronomical use cases. Conclusions. We recommend the modified Breiman estimator as a fast and reliable method to quantify the environment of galaxies.
Data sets in astronomy are growing to enormous sizes. Modern astronomical surveys provide not only image data but also catalogues of millions of objects (stars, galaxies), each object with hundreds of associated parameters. Exploration of this very high-dimensional data space poses a huge challenge. Subspace clustering is one among several approaches which have been proposed for this purpose in recent years. However, many clustering algorithms require the user to set a large number of parameters without any guidelines. Some methods also do not provide a concise summary of the datasets, or, if they do, they lack additional important information such as the number of clusters present or the significance of the clusters. In this paper, we propose a method for ranking subspaces for clustering which overcomes many of the above limitations. First we carry out a transformation from parametric space to discrete image space where the data are represented by a grid-based density field. Then we apply so-called connected morphological operators on this density field of astronomical objects that provides visual support for the analysis of the important subspaces. Clusters in subspaces correspond to high-intensity regions in the density image. The importance of a cluster is measured by a new quality criterion based on the dynamics of local maxima of the density. Connected operators are able to extract such regions with an indication of the number of clusters present. The subspaces are visualized during computation of the quality measure, so that the user can interact with the system to improve the results. In the result stage, we use three visualization toolkits linked within a graphical user interface so that the user can perform an in-depth exploration of the ranked subspaces. Evaluation based on synthetic as well as real astronomical datasets demonstrates the power of the new method. We recover various known astronomical relations directly from the data with little or no a priori assumptions. Hence, our method holds good prospects for discovering new relations as well.
High-dimensional data visualization is receiving increasing interest because of the growing abundance of highdimensional datasets. To understand such datasets, visualization of the structures present in the data, such as clusters, can be an invaluable tool. Structures may be present in the full high-dimensional space, as well as in its subspaces. Two widely used methods to visualize high-dimensional data are the scatter plot matrix (SPM) and the parallel coordinate plot (PCP). SPM allows a quick overview of the structures present in pairwise combinations of dimensions. On the other hand, PCP has the potential to visualize not only bi-dimensional structures but also higher dimensional ones. A problem with SPM is that it suffers from crowding and clutter which makes interpretation hard. Approaches to reduce clutter are available in the literature, based on changing the order of the dimensions. However, usually this reordering has a high computational complexity. For effective visualization of high-dimensional structures, also PCP requires a proper ordering of the dimensions. In this paper , we propose methods for reordering dimensions in PCP in such a way that high-dimensional structures (if present) become easier to perceive. We also present a method for dimension reordering in SPM which yields results that are comparable to those of existing approaches, but at a much lower computational cost. Our approach is based on finding relevant subspaces for clustering using a quality criterion and cluster information. The quality computation and cluster detection are done in image space, using connected morphological operators. We demonstrate the potential of our approach for synthetic and astronomical datasets, and show that our method compares favorably with a number of existing approaches.
Recent advancements in the field of computer vision with the help of deep neural networks have led us to explore and develop many existing challenges that were once unattended due to the lack of necessary technologies. Hand Sign/Gesture Recognition is one of the significant areas where the deep neural network is making a substantial impact. In the last few years, a large number of researches has been conducted to recognize hand signs and hand gestures, which we aim to extend to our mother-tongue, Bangla (also known as Bengali). The primary goal of our work is to make an automated tool to aid the people who are unable to speak. We developed a system that automatically detects hand sign based digits and speaks out the result in Bangla language. According to the report of the World Health Organization (WHO), 15% of people in the world live with some kind of disabilities. Among them, individuals with communication impairment such as speech disabilities experience substantial barrier in social interaction. The proposed system can be invaluable to mitigate such a barrier. The core of the system is built with a deep learning model which is based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). The model classifies hand sign based digits with 92% accuracy over validation data which ensures it a highly trustworthy system. Upon classification of the digits, the resulting output is fed to the text to speech engine and the translator unit eventually which generates audio output in Bangla language. A web application to demonstrate our tool is available at http://bit.ly/signdigits2banglaspeech.
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