Two novel approaches for photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and 2 MASS databases ∗

We investigate two training-set methods: support vector machines (SVMs) and Kernel Regression (KR) for photometric redshift estimation with the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 and Two Micron All Sky Survey databases. We probe the performances of SVMs and KR for different input patterns. Our experiments show that the more parameters considered, the accuracy doesn’t always increase, and only when appropriate parameters chosen, the accuracy can improve. Moreover for the two approaches, the best input pattern is different. With various parameters as input, the optimal bandwidth is dissimilar for KR. The rms errors of photometric redshifts based on SVM and KR methods, are less than 0.03 and 0.02, respectively. Finally the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques are summarized. Compared to other methods of estimating photometric redshifts, they show their superiorities, especially KR, in terms of accuracy.