1 Introduction

2 Sample Selection in the HSC Survey
2.1 The Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey
2.2 Outline of this manuscript
2.3 Selecting bright \((i<22\,\mathsf{mag})\) galaxies in HSC

3 Sample Properties
3.1 SED modeling using FAST
3.2 Rest-frame photometry and UVJ selection
3.3 Mid-IR AGN Selection using the WISE All-Sky Survey

4 Identifying interacting and merging galaxies within HSC images
4.1 Profile fitting with GALFIT
4.2 Automated Merger Detection using Supervised Machine Learning

5 Results
5.1 Incidence of AGN in interacting and non-interacting galaxies
5.2 Testing for observational bias and heterogeneity in our spec \(z\) sample
5.3 The most luminous AGN preferentially reside in merging galaxies

6 Discussion
6.1 Evidence for stochastic BH growth during major-merger events

7 Summary & Conclusions