Bibcode
                                    
                            Asensio Ramos, A.; Ramos Almeida, C.
    Bibliographical reference
                                    The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 696, Issue 2, pp. 2075-2085 (2009).
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                        5
            
                        2009
            
  Journal
                                    
                            Citations
                                    66
                            Refereed citations
                                    55
                            Description
                                    Our aim is to present a fast and general Bayesian inference framework
based on the synergy between machine learning techniques and standard
sampling methods and apply it to infer the physical properties of clumpy
dusty torus using infrared photometric high spatial resolution
observations of active galactic nuclei. We make use of the
Metropolis-Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling the
posterior distribution function. Such distribution results from
combining all a priori knowledge about the parameters of the model and
the information introduced by the observations. The main difficulty
resides in the fact that the model used to explain the observations is
computationally demanding and the sampling is very time consuming. For
this reason, we apply a set of artificial neural networks that are used
to approximate and interpolate a database of models. As a consequence,
models not present in the original database can be computed ensuring
continuity. We focus on the application of this solution scheme to the
recently developed public database of clumpy dusty torus models. The
machine learning scheme used in this paper allows us to generate any
model from the database using only a factor of 10-4 of the
original size of the database and a factor of 10-3 in
computing time. The posterior distribution obtained for each model
parameter allows us to investigate how the observations constrain the
parameters and which ones remain partially or completely undetermined,
providing statistically relevant confidence intervals. As an example,
the application to the nuclear region of Centaurus A shows that the
optical depth of the clouds, the total number of clouds, and the radial
extent of the cloud distribution zone are well constrained using only
six filters. The code is freely available from the authors.
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                        Alsina Ballester