Learning the latent structure of collider events

Abstract We describe a technique to learn the underlying structure of collider events directly from the data, without having a particular theoretical model in mind. It allows to infer aspects of the theoretical model that may have given rise to this structure, and can be used to cluster or classify...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: B. M. Dillon, D. A. Faroughy, J. F. Kamenik, M. Szewc
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2020-10-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP10(2020)206
Description
Summary:Abstract We describe a technique to learn the underlying structure of collider events directly from the data, without having a particular theoretical model in mind. It allows to infer aspects of the theoretical model that may have given rise to this structure, and can be used to cluster or classify the events for analysis purposes. The unsupervised machine-learning technique is based on the probabilistic (Bayesian) generative model of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We pair the model with an approximate inference algorithm called Variational Inference, which we then use to extract the latent probability distributions describing the learned underlying structure of collider events. We provide a detailed systematic study of the technique using two example scenarios to learn the latent structure of di-jet event samples made up of QCD background events and either t t ¯ $$ t\overline{t} $$ or hypothetical W′ → (ϕ → WW)W signal events.
ISSN:1029-8479