Uncovering Tidal Treasures: Automated Classification of Faint Tidal Features in DECaLS Data

Tidal features are a key observable prediction of the hierarchical model of galaxy formation and contain a wealth of information about the properties and history of a galaxy. Modern wide-field surveys such as LSST and Euclid will revolutionise the study of tidal features. However, the volume of data will prohibit visual inspection to identify features, thereby motivating a need to develop automated detection methods. This paper presents a visual classification of $\sim2,000$ galaxies from the DECaLS survey into different tidal feature categories: arms, streams, shells, and diffuse. We trained a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to reproduce the assigned visual classifications using these labels. Evaluated on a testing set where galaxies with tidal features were outnumbered $\sim1:10$, our network performed very well and retrieved a median $98.7\pm0.3$, $99.1\pm0.5$, $97.0\pm0.8$, and $99.4^{+0.2}_{-0.6}$ per cent of the actual instances of arm, stream, shell, and diffuse features respectively for just 20 per cent contamination. A modified version that identified galaxies with any feature against those without achieved scores of $0.981^{+0.001}_{-0.003}$, $0.834^{+0.014}_{-0.026}$, $0.974^{+0.008}_{-0.004}$, and $0.900^{+0.073}_{-0.015}$ for the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 metrics, respectively. We used a Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping analysis to highlight important regions on images for a given classification to verify the network was classifying the galaxies correctly. This is the first demonstration of using CNNs to classify tidal features into sub-categories, and it will pave the way for the identification of different categories of tidal features in the vast samples of galaxies that forthcoming wide-field surveys will deliver.