Mario Pasquato

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Xi 熙 Kang 康

Andrea Maccio

2025-01-28

The Astrophysical Journal (published)

Beyond Causal Discovery for Astronomy: Learning Meaningful Representations with Independent Component Analysis

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Andrea Maccio

2024-10-30

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/CRL (poster)

openreview.net

Beyond Causal Discovery for Astronomy: Learning Meaningful Representations with Independent Component Analysis

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

A. Macciò

2024-10-18

ArXiv (preprint)

Causal Discovery in Astrophysics: Unraveling Supermassive Black Hole and Galaxy Coevolution

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Xi Kang

Andrea Maccio

Correlation does not imply causation, but patterns of statistical association between variables can be exploited to infer a causal structure… (see more) (even with purely observational data) with the burgeoning field of causal discovery. As a purely observational science, astrophysics has much to gain by exploiting these new methods. The supermassive black hole (SMBH)--galaxy interaction has long been constrained by observed scaling relations, that is low-scatter correlations between variables such as SMBH mass and the central velocity dispersion of stars in a host galaxy's bulge. This study, using advanced causal discovery techniques and an up-to-date dataset, reveals a causal link between galaxy properties and dynamically-measured SMBH masses. We apply a score-based Bayesian framework to compute the exact conditional probabilities of every causal structure that could possibly describe our galaxy sample. With the exact posterior distribution, we determine the most likely causal structures and notice a probable causal reversal when separating galaxies by morphology. In elliptical galaxies, bulge properties (built from major mergers) tend to influence SMBH growth, while in spiral galaxies, SMBHs are seen to affect host galaxy properties, potentially through feedback in gas-rich environments. For spiral galaxies, SMBHs progressively quench star formation, whereas in elliptical galaxies, quenching is complete, and the causal connection has reversed. Our findings support theoretical models of hierarchical assembly of galaxies and active galactic nuclei feedback regulating galaxy evolution. Our study suggests the potentiality for further exploration of causal links in astrophysical and cosmological scaling relations, as well as any other observational science.

2024-10-01

ArXiv (preprint)

Causal Discovery in Astrophysics: Unraveling Supermassive Black Hole and Galaxy Coevolution

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Xi 熙 Kang 康

Andrea Maccio

Correlation does not imply causation, but patterns of statistical association between variables can be exploited to infer a causal structure… (see more) (even with purely observational data) with the burgeoning field of causal discovery. As a purely observational science, astrophysics has much to gain by exploiting these new methods. The supermassive black hole (SMBH)–galaxy interaction has long been constrained by observed scaling relations, which is low-scatter correlations between variables such as SMBH mass and the central velocity dispersion of stars in a host galaxy's bulge. This study, using advanced causal discovery techniques and an up-to-date data set, reveals a causal link between galaxy properties and dynamically measured SMBH masses. We apply a score-based Bayesian framework to compute the exact conditional probabilities of every causal structure that could possibly describe our galaxy sample. With the exact posterior distribution, we determine the most likely causal structures and notice a probable causal reversal when separating galaxies by morphology. In elliptical galaxies, bulge properties (built from major mergers) tend to influence SMBH growth, while, in spiral galaxies, SMBHs are seen to affect host galaxy properties, potentially through feedback in gas-rich environments. For spiral galaxies, SMBHs progressively quench star formation, whereas, in elliptical galaxies, quenching is complete, and the causal connection has reversed. Our findings support theoretical models of hierarchical assembly of galaxies and active galactic nuclei feedback regulating galaxy evolution. Our study suggests the potentiality for further exploration of causal links in astrophysical and cosmological scaling relations, as well as any other observational science.

2024-10-01

ArXiv (preprint)

Causal Discovery in Astrophysics: Unraveling Supermassive Black Hole and Galaxy Coevolution

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Xi 熙 Kang 康

Andrea Maccio

Correlation does not imply causation, but patterns of statistical association between variables can be exploited to infer a causal structure… (see more) (even with purely observational data) with the burgeoning field of causal discovery. As a purely observational science, astrophysics has much to gain by exploiting these new methods. The supermassive black hole (SMBH)–galaxy interaction has long been constrained by observed scaling relations, which is low-scatter correlations between variables such as SMBH mass and the central velocity dispersion of stars in a host galaxy's bulge. This study, using advanced causal discovery techniques and an up-to-date data set, reveals a causal link between galaxy properties and dynamically measured SMBH masses. We apply a score-based Bayesian framework to compute the exact conditional probabilities of every causal structure that could possibly describe our galaxy sample. With the exact posterior distribution, we determine the most likely causal structures and notice a probable causal reversal when separating galaxies by morphology. In elliptical galaxies, bulge properties (built from major mergers) tend to influence SMBH growth, while, in spiral galaxies, SMBHs are seen to affect host galaxy properties, potentially through feedback in gas-rich environments. For spiral galaxies, SMBHs progressively quench star formation, whereas, in elliptical galaxies, quenching is complete, and the causal connection has reversed. Our findings support theoretical models of hierarchical assembly of galaxies and active galactic nuclei feedback regulating galaxy evolution. Our study suggests the potentiality for further exploration of causal links in astrophysical and cosmological scaling relations, as well as any other observational science.

2024-10-01

ArXiv (preprint)

Variable Star Light Curves in Koopman Space

Nicolas Mekhaël

Mario Pasquato

Gaia Carenini

V. Braga

Piero Trevisan

Giuseppe Bono

We present the first application of data-driven techniques for dynamical system analysis based on Koopman theory to variable stars. We focus… (see more) on light curves of RRLyrae type variables, in the Galactic globular cluster

2024-07-23

ArXiv (preprint)

Variable Star Light Curves in Koopman Space

Nicolas Mekhaël

Mario Pasquato

Gaia Carenini

Vittorio F. Braga

Piero Trevisan

Giuseppe Bono

2024-06-16

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/AI4Science (spotlight)

openreview.net

Interpretable Machine Learning for Finding Intermediate-mass Black Holes

Mario Pasquato

Piero Trevisan

Abbas Askar

Gaia Carenini

Michela Mapelli

2024-04-09

The Astrophysical Journal (published)

Active learning meets fractal decision boundaries: a cautionary tale from the Sitnikov three-body problem

Nicolas Payot

Mario Pasquato

Alessandro A. Trani

Chaotic systems such as the gravitational N-body problem are ubiquitous in astronomy. Machine learning (ML) is increasingly deployed to pred… (see more)ict the evolution of such systems, e.g. with the goal of speeding up simulations. Strategies such as active Learning (AL) are a natural choice to optimize ML training. Here we showcase an AL failure when predicting the stability of the Sitnikov three-body problem, the simplest case of N-body problem displaying chaotic behavior. We link this failure to the fractal nature of our classification problem's decision boundary. This is a potential pitfall in optimizing large sets of N-body simulations via AL in the context of star cluster physics, galactic dynamics, or cosmology.

2023-11-29

ArXiv (preprint)

The search for the lost attractor

Mario Pasquato

Syphax Haddad

Pierfrancesco Di Cintio

Alexandre Adam

No'e Dia

Mircea Petrache

Ugo Niccolo Di Carlo

Alessandro A. Trani

2023-11-27

ArXiv (preprint)