Machine learning
GS PAPER III: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.
Context: Indian Astronomers have developed a new method based on Machine Learning that can identify cluster stars-- assembly of stars physically related through common origin, with much greater certainty.
- The method can be used on clusters of all ages, distances, and densities.
- The method has been used to identify hundreds of additional stars for six different clusters up to 18000 light-years away and uncover peculiar stars.
Need:
- Studying stars and how they evolve is the cornerstone of But understanding them is difficult since they are observed at different ages.
- A star cluster is a great place to study stars. All stars in a star cluster have approximately the same age and chemistry, so any differences seen can be attributed to the peculiarities in individual stars with certainty.
- As the clusters are part of the Milky Way, there are many stars between us and the cluster, so it isn’t easy to identify and select the stars of a particular cluster.
Probabilistic Random Forest
- It is a machine learning technique that uses a combination of parallax, proper motion, temperature, brightness and other parameters to classify each star as a cluster member or a non-member.
- It gives very accurate information about the brightness, parallax, and proper motion of more than a billion stars with an accuracy of 1 milli-arc-second (equivalent to seeing a person standing on the moon) to pick out the stars that are cluster members.
- The newly developed method can now identify cluster stars with much greater certainty and pinpoint individual stars that behave differently from their siblings.
Machine learning
- It is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building.
- It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.
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