arXiv subjects

John Andrew Raine

Publications and source records attributed to John Andrew Raine.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

CURTAINs Flows For Flows: Constructing Unobserved Regions with Maximum Likelihood Estimation

Model independent techniques for constructing background data templates using generative models have shown great promise for use in searches for new physics processes at the LHC. We introduce a major improvement to the CURTAINs method by training the conditional normalizing flow between two side-band regions using maximum likelihood estimation instead of an optimal transport loss. The new training objective improves the robustness and fidelity of the transformed data and is much faster and easier to train. We compare the performance against the previous approach and the current state of the art using the LHC Olympics anomaly detection dataset, where we see a significant improvement in sensitivity over the original CURTAINs method. Furthermore, CURTAINsF4F requires substantially less computational resources to cover a large number of signal regions than other fully data driven approaches. When using an efficient configuration, an order of magnitude more models can be trained in the same time required for ten signal regions, without a significant drop in performance.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2023

Flow Away your Differences: Conditional Normalizing Flows as an Improvement to Reweighting

We present an alternative to reweighting techniques for modifying distributions to account for a desired change in an underlying conditional distribution, as is often needed to correct for mis-modelling in a simulated sample. We employ conditional normalizing flows to learn the full conditional probability distribution from which we sample new events for conditional values drawn from the target distribution to produce the desired, altered distribution. In contrast to common reweighting techniques, this procedure is independent of binning choice and does not rely on an estimate of the density ratio between two distributions. In several toy examples we show that normalizing flows outperform reweighting approaches to match the distribution of the target.We demonstrate that the corrected distribution closes well with the ground truth, and a statistical uncertainty on the training dataset can be ascertained with bootstrapping. In our examples, this leads to a statistical precision up to three times greater than using reweighting techniques with identical sample sizes for the source and target distributions. We also explore an application in the context of high energy particle physics.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2023

The Mass-ive Issue: Anomaly Detection in Jet Physics

In the hunt for new and unobserved phenomena in particle physics, attention has turned in recent years to using advanced machine learning techniques for model independent searches. In this paper we highlight the main challenge of applying anomaly detection to jet physics, where preserving an unbiased estimator of the jet mass remains a critical piece of any model independent search. Using Variational Autoencoders and multiple industry-standard anomaly detection metrics, we demonstrate the unavoidable nature of this problem.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2023

CURTAINs for your Sliding Window: Constructing Unobserved Regions by Transforming Adjacent Intervals

We propose a new model independent technique for constructing background data templates for use in searches for new physics processes at the LHC. This method, called CURTAINs, uses invertible neural networks to parametrise the distribution of side band data as a function of the resonant observable. The network learns a transformation to map any data point from its value of the resonant observable to another chosen value. Using CURTAINs, a template for the background data in the signal window is constructed by mapping the data from the side-bands into the signal region. We perform anomaly detection using the CURTAINs background template to enhance the sensitivity to new physics in a bump hunt. We demonstrate its performance in a sliding window search across a wide range of mass values. Using the LHC Olympics dataset, we demonstrate that CURTAINs matches the performance of other leading approaches which aim to improve the sensitivity of bump hunts, can be trained on a much smaller range of the invariant mass, and is fully data driven.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2022

Flows for Flows: Training Normalizing Flows Between Arbitrary Distributions with Maximum Likelihood Estimation

Normalizing flows are constructed from a base distribution with a known density and a diffeomorphism with a tractable Jacobian. The base density of a normalizing flow can be parameterised by a different normalizing flow, thus allowing maps to be found between arbitrary distributions. We demonstrate and explore the utility of this approach and show it is particularly interesting in the case of conditional normalizing flows and for introducing optimal transport constraints on maps that are constructed using normalizing flows.

cs.LG↗