A Light Idea

I have been talking to Adam Pauls about this likelihood method for selecting quasars for BOSS in SDSS-III. He has suggested looking into this application: SVM-Light. SVM is a support vector machine. It is basically a well-establish classification system for multivariate systems. The interesting thing about this program is that I can not only use it to optimize the likelihood algorithm, but I can put in the results of other classification algorithms (we are also using neural net and KDE methods) and use those as additional "variables" in my system. I could also use additional information like sky position or photometric redshift to add weights to different objects. Adam is showing me how to use this, and I am hoping it will be useful for optimizing the selection codes.