Performance of morphological classifiers for galaxy mergers compared to current machine learning methods

Aims. Non-parametric morphological statistics can be used for efficient classification of galaxy mergers. This work aims to compare the performance of morphological merger classifiers to state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models. A secondary aim is to produce updated criteria for mergers based on non-parametric morphological statistics. Methods. The Gini coefficient (G), $M_{20}$ statistic, and concentration ($C$) were calculated for mock Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) images based on the IllustrisTNG and Horizon-AGN simulations, and observations from HSC-SSP. The IllustrisTNG images were used to find the line which best separates mergers and non-mergers in 2D morphological space with a Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method. Results. Based on the MCMC results, we classified galaxies with $G>(-0.267\pm0.081)M_{20}+(0.143\pm0.012)$ or $G>(0.162\pm0.048)C-(0.149\pm0.12)$ as mergers, these criteria had precisions of 69.5\% and 72.3\% respectively when applied to previously unseen IllustrisTNG mock HSC-SSP images. The precisions of the morphological classifications are consistent with state-of-the-art ML methods. The morphological classifiers were found to be effective at selecting only pre-mergers; post-merger galaxies are indistinguishable from non-mergers in terms of their $G$, $M_{20}$, and $C$ values. Morphological classifiers displayed a similar robustness to new data to ML methods up to a redshift of $\sim0.52$ and maintained robustness better than ML methods based on convolutional neural networks in the redshift range $0.52<z<1$. Conclusions. This work presents updated morphological classifiers which achieve similar precisions to ML based merger classifiers with a high robustness to new data. New morphological statistics are needed to identify the features of post-merger galaxies.