Spectral Preprocessing and Its Effect on Galaxy/Quasar Classification

Because of the effects of noise, distortion, observational environment and other factors, some appropriate preprocessing should be made in advance of automatic classification of celestial spectra. We have studied the effect of data format and flux standardization on the automatic classification of sky survey spectra. A basic model adaptable for the order-of-magnitude variation of fluxes is proposed, and the corresponding standardization methods are given. Our experimental results on galaxy and quasar classification show that the logarithmic wavelength data format is better for the automatic spectral classification. By these experiments, the reasonableness of the proposed model and the performances of the given flux standardization methods are verified. Especially, it is noted that the commonly used flux standardization is the worst, among other standardizations, for automatic spectral classification.