English

Galaxy Morphology Classification using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2022-01-19 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We introduce a continuous depth version of the Residual Network (ResNet) called Neural ordinary differential equations (NODE) for the purpose of galaxy morphology classification. We carry out a classification of galaxy images from the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset, consisting of five distinct classes, and obtained an accuracy between 91-95\%, depending on the image class. We train NODE with different numerical techniques such as adjoint and Adaptive Checkpoint Adjoint (ACA) and compare them against ResNet. While ResNet has certain drawbacks, such as time consuming architecture selection (e.g. the number of layers) and the requirement of a large dataset needed for training, NODE can overcome these limitations. Through our results, we show that that the accuracy of NODE is comparable to ResNet, and the number of parameters used is about one-third as compared to ResNet, thus leading to a smaller memory footprint, which would benefit next generation surveys.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.07735,
  title  = {Galaxy Morphology Classification using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations},
  author = {Raghav Gupta and P. K. Srijith and Shantanu Desai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.07735},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures. Now also used NODE_ACA. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Computing

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:57:39.545Z