A Comparative Study of KBS, ANN and Statistical Clustering Techniques for Unattended Stellar Classification

The purpose of this work is to present a comparative analysis of knowledge-based systems, artificial neural networks and statistical clustering algorithms applied to the classification of low resolution stellar spectra. These techniques were used to classify a sample of approximately 258 optical spectra from public catalogues using the standard MK system. At present, we already dispose of a hybrid system that carries out this task, applying the most appropriate classification method to each spectrum with a success rate that is similar to that of human experts.