A statistical study of lopsided galaxies using random forest

Abstract

Lopsided galaxies are late-type galaxies with a non-axisymmetric disk due to an uneven distribution of their stellar mass. Despite being a relatively common perturbation, several questions regarding its origin and the information that can be extracted from them about the evolutionary history of late-type galaxies. The advent of several large multi-band photometric surveys will allow us to statistically analyze this perturbation, with information that was not previously available. Given the strong correlation between lopsidedness and the structural properties of the galaxies, this paper aims to develop a method to automatically classify late-type galaxies between lopsided and symmetric. We seek to explore if an accurate classification can be obtain by only considering their internal properties, without additional information about the environment. We select 8000 late-type galaxies from TNG50. A Fourier decomposition of their stellar mass surface density is used to label galaxies as lopsided and symmetric. We trained a Random Forest classifier to rapidly and automatically identify this type of perturbations, exclusively using galaxies internal properties. We test different algorithms to deal with the imbalance of our data and select the most suitable approach based on the considered metrics. We show that our trained algorithm can provide a very accurate and rapid classification of lopsided galaxies. The excellent results obtained by our classifier strongly supports the hypothesis that lopsidedness is mainly a tracer of galaxies internal structures. We show that similar results can be obtained using observable quantities, readily obtainable from multi-bad photometric surveys. Our results show it allows a rapid and accurate classification of lopsided galaxies, allowing us to explore whether lopsidedness in present-day disk galaxies is connected to galaxies specific evolutionary histories.