A Bayesian approach to strong lens finding in the era of wide-area surveys

ABSTRACT The arrival of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), Euclid-Wide and Roman wide-area sensitive surveys will herald a new era in strong lens science in which the number of strong lenses known is expected to rise from O (10³) to O (10⁵). However, current lens-finding methods still require time-consuming follow-up visual inspection by strong lens experts to remove false positives which is only set to increase with these surveys. In this work, we demonstrate a range of methods to produce calibrated probabilities to help determine the veracity of any given lens candidate. To do this we use the classifications from citizen science and multiple neural networks for galaxies selected from the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey. Our methodology is not restricted to particular classifier types and could be applied to any strong lens classifier which produces quantitative scores. Using these calibrated probabilities, we generate an ensemble classifier, combining citizen science, and neural network lens finders. We find such an ensemble can provide improved classification over the individual classifiers. We find a false-positive rate of 10−3 can be achieved with a completeness of 46 per cent, compared to 34 per cent for the best individual classifier. Given the large number of galaxy–galaxy strong lenses anticipated in LSST, such improvement would still produce significant numbers of false positives, in which case using calibrated probabilities will be essential for population analysis of large populations of lenses and to help prioritize candidates for follow-up.