Contributor info: Dr Bryan Ostdiek

Bryan Ostdiek

SciPost Phys. 12, 045 (2022) · published 31 January 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

There is an increased interest in model agnostic search strategies for physics beyond the standard model at the Large Hadron Collider. We introduce a Deep Set Variational Autoencoder and present results on the Dark Machines Anomaly Score Challenge. We find that the method attains the best anomaly detection ability when there is no decoding step for the network, and the anomaly score is based solely on the representation within the encoded latent space. This method was one of the top-performing models in the Dark Machines Challenge, both for the open data sets as well as the blinded data sets.

T. Aarrestad, M. van Beekveld, M. Bona, A. Boveia, S. Caron, J. Davies, A. De Simone, C. Doglioni, J. M. Duarte, A. Farbin, H. Gupta, L. Hendriks, L. Heinrich, J. Howarth, P. Jawahar, A. Jueid, J. Lastow, A. Leinweber, J. Mamuzic, E. Merényi, A. Morandini, P. Moskvitina, C. Nellist, J. Ngadiuba, B. Ostdiek, M. Pierini, B. Ravina, R. Ruiz de Austri, S. Sekmen, M. Touranakou, M. Vaškevičiūte, R. Vilalta, J. R. Vlimant, R. Verheyen, M. White, E. Wulff, E. Wallin, K. A. Wozniak, Z. Zhang

SciPost Phys. 12, 043 (2022) · published 28 January 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We describe the outcome of a data challenge conducted as part of the Dark Machines Initiative and the Les Houches 2019 workshop on Physics at TeV colliders. The challenged aims at detecting signals of new physics at the LHC using unsupervised machine learning algorithms. First, we propose how an anomaly score could be implemented to define model-independent signal regions in LHC searches. We define and describe a large benchmark dataset, consisting of >1 Billion simulated LHC events corresponding to $10~\rm{fb}^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. We then review a wide range of anomaly detection and density estimation algorithms, developed in the context of the data challenge, and we measure their performance in a set of realistic analysis environments. We draw a number of useful conclusions that will aid the development of unsupervised new physics searches during the third run of the LHC, and provide our benchmark dataset for future studies at https://www.phenoMLdata.org. Code to reproduce the analysis is provided at https://github.com/bostdiek/DarkMachines-UnsupervisedChallenge.

Layne Bradshaw, Rashmish K. Mishra, Andrea Mitridate, Bryan Ostdiek

SciPost Phys. 8, 011 (2020) · published 24 January 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Searching for new physics in large data sets needs a balance between two competing effects---signal identification vs background distortion. In this work, we perform a systematic study of both single variable and multivariate jet tagging methods that aim for this balance. The methods preserve the shape of the background distribution by either augmenting the training procedure or the data itself. Multiple quantitative metrics to compare the methods are considered, for tagging 2-, 3-, or 4-prong jets from the QCD background. This is the first study to show that the data augmentation techniques of Planing and PCA based scaling deliver similar performance as the augmented training techniques of Adversarial NN and uBoost, but are both easier to implement and computationally cheaper.