BALQSO classifier
Spotting broad absorption line quasars in Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra with machine learning
Quasars are the bright centers of distant galaxies, powered by gas falling onto a giant black hole. Some of them show broad absorption lines in their light, a sign of fast winds blowing outward from around the black hole.
I set out to train a model to spot these quasars automatically, using spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The public code covers the data side of the project: picking quasars from the survey catalogs, downloading their spectra, and testing simple baseline models.