1 INTRODUCTION  
2 METHODOLOGY  
2.1 The Illustris TNG simulations  
2.2 Observational sample  
2.3 Simulated sample  
2.4 Synthetic image generation  
2.5 Source segmentation and deblending  
2.6 Morphological measurements  
2.7 Merger identification  
2.8 Random forest classification  
3 RESULTS  
3.1 The morphologies of TNG50 and GAMA-KiDS galaxies  
3.2 The morphologies of true mergers and non-mergers  
3.3 Classifying mergers with random forests  
3.4 The merger incidence of GAMA-KiDS observations  
4 DISCUSSION  
5 SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK