• Mining the information content of member galaxies in the halo mass modelling

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: Motivated by previous findings that the magnitude gap between certain satellite galaxy and the central galaxy can be used to improve the estimation of halo mass, we carry out a systematic study of the information content of different member galaxies in the modelling of the host halo mass using a machine learning approach. We employ data from the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG and train a Random Forest (RF) algorithm to predict a halo mass from the stellar masses of its member galaxies. Exhaustive feature selection is adopted to disentangle the importances of different galaxy members. We confirm that an additional satellite does improve the halo mass estimation compared to that estimated by the central alone. However, the magnitude of this improvement does not differ significantly using different satellite galaxies. When three galaxies are used in the halo mass prediction, the best combination is always that of the central galaxy with the most massive satellite and the smallest satellite. Furthermore, among the top 7 galaxies, the combination of a central galaxy and two or three satellite galaxies gives a near-optimal estimation of halo mass, and further addition of galaxies does not raise the precision of the prediction. We demonstrate that these dependences can be understood from the shape variation of the conditional satellite distribution, with different member galaxies accounting for distinct halo-dependent features in different parts of the cumulative stellar mass function.

  • What to expect from dynamical modelling of cluster haloes II. Investigating dynamical state indicators with Random Forest

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: We investigate the importances of various dynamical features in predicting the dynamical state (DS) of galaxy clusters, based on the Random Forest (RF) machine learning approach. We use a large sample of galaxy clusters from the Three Hundred Project of hydrodynamical zoomed-in simulations, and construct dynamical features from the raw data as well as from the corresponding mock maps in the optical, X-ray, and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) channels. Instead of relying on the impurity based feature importance of the RF algorithm, we directly use the out-of-bag (OOB) scores to evaluate the importances of individual features and different feature combinations. Among all the features studied, we find the virial ratio, $\eta$, to be the most important single feature. The features calculated directly from the simulations and in 3-dimensions carry more information on the DS than those constructed from the mock maps. Compared with the features based on X-ray or SZ maps, features related to the centroid positions are more important. Despite the large number of investigated features, a combination of up to three features of different types can already saturate the score of the prediction. Lastly, we show that the most sensitive feature $\eta$ is strongly correlated with the well-known half-mass bias in dynamical modelling. Without a selection in DS, cluster halos have an asymmetric distribution in $\eta$, corresponding to an overall positive half-mass bias. Our work provides a quantitative reference for selecting the best features to discriminate the DS of galaxy clusters in both simulations and observations.