The application of artificial neural networks in astronomy

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are computer algorithms inspired from simple models of human central nervous system activity. They can be roughly divided into two main kinds: supervised and unsupervised. The supervised approach lays the stress on "teaching" a machine to do the work of a mention human expert, usually by showing examples for which the true answer is supplied by the expert. The unsupervised one is aimed at learning new things from the data, and most useful when the data cannot easily be plotted in a two or three dimensional space. ANNs have been used widely and successfully in various fields, for instance, pattern recognition, financial analysis, biology, engineering and so on, because they have many merits such as self-learning, self-adapting, good robustness and dynamically rapid response as well as strong capability of dealing with non-linear problems. In the last few years there has been an increasing interest toward the astronomical applications of ANNs. In this paper, the authors firstly introduce the fundamental principle of ANNs together with the architecture of the network and outline various kinds of learning algorithms and network toplogies. The specific aspects of the applications of ANNs in astronomical problems are also listed, which contain the strong capabilities of approximating to arbitrary accuracy, any nonlinear functional mapping, parallel and distributed storage, tolerance of faulty and generalization of results. They summarize the advantages and disadvantages of main ANN models available to the astronomical community. Furthermore, the application cases of ANNs in astronomy are mainly described in detail. Here, the focus is on some of the most interesting fields of its application, for example: object detection, star/galaxy classification, spectral classification, galaxy morphology classification, the estimation of photometric redshifts of galaxies and time series analysis. In addition, other kinds of applications have been only touched upon. Finally, the development and application prospects of ANNs is discussed. With the increase of quantity and the distributing complexity of astronomical data, its scientific exploitation requires a variety of automated tools, which are capable to perform huge amount of work, such as data preprocessing, feature selection, data reduction, data mining amd data analysis. ANNs, one of intelligent tools, will show more and more superiorities.