Machine Learning Workshop 2023

ADACS ran a 4 part machine learning workshop at the 2023 meeting of the astronomical society of Australia held at Macquarie University from the 3rd-7th of July.

The workshop began with a lecture on “Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Astronomy” (slides here). The lecture introduces machine learning and AI, and gives a historical look at what these topics include and how they have developed over time. The main body of the lecture covers different aspects of machine learning, including some of the main tasks and how they have been successfully used in astronomy research. The lecture concludes with advice on how to get started with machine learning, and where to reach out for help.

Following the lecture, there were three “Deep Dive” sessions which gave participants an opportunity do better understand and apply some machine learning techniques to astronomy relevant data sets.

• Deep Dive I explored the task of classification as well as cross validation and assessing the performance of a ML model
• Deep Dive II explored the task of regression as well as feature selection, feature engineering, and dimensionality reduction
• Deep Dive III explored the task of clustering and some of the different clustering related metrics

Each of the Deep Dive sessions are presented as Jupyter notebooks running on the Google Colaboratory.