Mario Pasquato

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

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Tristan Deleu

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Pablo Lemos

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Yoshua Bengio

Xi Kang

Andrea Valerio Maccio

Yashar Hezaveh

Correlation does not imply causation, but patterns of statistical association between variables can be exploited to infer a causal structure… (voir plus) (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.

2025-01-27

The Astrophysical Journal (publié)

doi.org

arxiv.org

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

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Andrea Maccio

Yashar Hezaveh

2024-10-29

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

openreview.net

Variable Star Light Curves in Koopman Space

Nicolas Mekhaël

Mario Pasquato

GAIA CARENINI

Vittorio F. Braga

PIERO TREVISAN

Giuseppe Bono

Yashar Hezaveh

2024-06-15

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

openreview.net

Interpretable machine learning for finding intermediate-mass black holes

Mario Pasquato

PIERO TREVISAN

ABBAS ASKAR

Pablo Lemos

GAIA CARENINI

MICHELA MAPELLI

Yashar Hezaveh

Definitive evidence that globular clusters (GCs) host intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) is elusive. Machine learning (ML) models trained… (voir plus) on GC simulations can in principle predict IMBH host candidates based on observable features. This approach has two limitations: first, an accurate ML model is expected to be a black box due to complexity; second, despite our efforts to realistically simulate GCs, the simulation physics or initial conditions may fail to fully reflect reality. Therefore our training data may be biased, leading to a failure in generalization on observational data. Both the first issue -- explainability/interpretability -- and the second -- out of distribution generalization and fairness -- are active areas of research in ML. Here we employ techniques from these fields to address them: we use the anchors method to explain an XGBoost classifier; we also independently train a natively interpretable model using Certifiably Optimal RulE ListS (CORELS). The resulting model has a clear physical meaning, but loses some performance with respect to XGBoost. We evaluate potential candidates in real data based not only on classifier predictions but also on their similarity to the training data, measured by the likelihood of a kernel density estimation model. This measures the realism of our simulated data and mitigates the risk that our models may produce biased predictions by working in extrapolation. We apply our classifiers to real GCs, obtaining a predicted classification, a measure of the confidence of the prediction, an out-of-distribution flag, a local rule explaining the prediction of XGBoost and a global rule from CORELS.

2024-04-08

The Astrophysical Journal (publié)

doi.org

arxiv.org

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

Nicolas Payot

Mario Pasquato

Alessandro A. Trani

Yashar Hezaveh

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Chaotic systems such as the gravitational N-body problem are ubiquitous in astronomy. Machine learning (ML) is increasingly deployed to pred… (voir plus)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.

2023-11-28

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org