Adaptive stellar spectral subclass classification based on Bayesian SVMs

Stellar spectral classification is one of the most fundamental tasks in survey astronomy. Many automated classification methods have been applied to spectral data. However, their main limitation is that the model parameters must be tuned repeatedly to deal with different data sets. In this paper, we utilize the Bayesian support vector machines (BSVM) to classify the spectral subclass data. Based on Gibbs sampling, BSVM can infer all model parameters adaptively according to different data sets, which allows us to circumvent the time-consuming cross validation for penalty parameter. We explored different normalization methods for stellar spectral data, and the best one has been suggested in this study. Finally, experimental results on several stellar spectral subclass classification problems show that the BSVM model not only possesses good adaptability but also provides better prediction performance than traditional methods. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.