Structured variational inference for simulating populations of radio galaxies

We present a model for generating postage stamp images of synthetic Fanaroff–Riley Class I and Class II radio galaxies suitable for use in simulations of future radio surveys such as those being developed for the Square Kilometre Array. This model uses a fully connected neural network to implement structured variational inference through a variational autoencoder and decoder architecture. In order to optimize the dimensionality of the latent space for the autoencoder, we introduce the radio morphology inception score (RAMIS), a quantitative method for assessing the quality of generated images, and discuss in detail how data pre-processing choices can affect the value of this measure. We examine the 2D latent space of the VAEs and discuss how this can be used to control the generation of synthetic populations, whilst also cautioning how it may lead to biases when used for data augmentation.