Redshift reliability flags (VVDS data)

A fundamental element in these pipelines is to associate to each galaxy redshift measurement a quality, or reliability, estimate. In this work, we introduce a new approach to automate the spectroscopic redshift reliability assessment based on machine learning (ML) and characteristics of the redshift probability density function.

We propose to rephrase the spectroscopic redshift estimation into a Bayesian framework, in order to incorporate all sources of information and uncertainties related to the redshift estimation process and produce a redshift posterior probability density function (PDF). To automate the assessment of a reliability flag, we exploit key features in the redshift posterior PDF and machine learning algorithms.