Metallicity and α-abundance for 48 million stars in low-extinction regions in the Milky Way

We estimate ([M/H], [α/M]) for 48 million giants and dwarfs in low dust extinction regions from the Gaia DR3 XP spectra by using tree-based machine-learning models trained on APOGEE DR17 and metal-poor star sample of Li et al. The root mean square error of our estimation is 0.0890 dex for [M/H] and 0.0436 dex for [α/M], when we evaluate our models with the test data. Our estimation is most reliable for giants and metal-rich stars, because the training data are dominated by such stars. The high-[α/M] stars and low-[α/M] stars selected by our ([M/H], [α/M]) show different kinematical properties for giants and low-temperature dwarfs. We further investigate how our machine-learning models extract information on ([M/H], [α/M]). Intriguingly, our models seem to extract information on [α/M] from Na D lines (589 nm) and Mg I line (516 nm). This result is understandable given the observed correlation between Na and Mg abundances in the literature. The catalog of ([M/H], [α/M]) as well as their associated uncertainties will be publicly available online.