Rubin Commissioning and the Photo-z Validation Cooperative

The scientific community has a considerable wealth of expertise in generating PZ and are best suited to scientifically validate the LSST Object catalog PZ.

Thus, the Rubin Data Management (DM) team will facilitate the “Photo-z Validation Cooperative” during Rubin’s commissioning phase in order to support the science community to focus on:

  • assembling training sets and validation metrics,
  • helping to implement PZ estimators with the LSST Science Pipelines,
  • using the data previews to validate the estimators’ performance, and
  • documenting, evaluating, and sharing the results.

These activities will inform DM’s selection of photo-z estimator(s) for the Object catalog, but more broadly would also enable the science community to prepare for PZ science with the LSST and to develop user-generated PZ catalogs.

During this time, DM will focus on providing technical support for the implementation of the photo-z estimators that were shortlisted after the PZ LOR, but the community may also consider other estimators.

Most participants will use the Data Previews – It is expected that most of the science community participating in the “Photo-z Validation Cooperative” will use the commissioning data that is released as part of Data Preview 1 and 2 (DP1 and DP2), and will not need to formally join the Rubin Commissioning Team and have access to the unreleased commissioning data. This Community Forum category will serve as the communications hub for the “Photo-z Validation Cooperative”. Everyone who is interested is encouraged to “watch” this category.

Seeking PZ expertise for the Rubin Commissioning Team – A small group of ~5-10 individuals who have expertise with PZ estimators is sought to join the Rubin Commissioning team (sitcomtn-010). These individuals would work closely with DM, taking the lead on guiding implementation and performing early science validation for the shortlisted PZ estimators with the unreleased commissioning data, which will help the science community make use of DP1 and DP2 when they are released. See Section 6.1 of DMTN-049 for details regarding eligibility and expectations, and/or contact Melissa Graham by March 15 if you’re interested.

The “Roadmap to Photometric Redshifts for the LSST Object Catalog”, DMTN-049, has been updated to include details about the plans for Rubin Commissioning and the Photo-z Validation Cooperative.

Questions about any of the above are encouraged to be posted as replies in this topic thread or as new topics in the “Science - Photometric Redshifts” category of the Rubin Community Forum.

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