A method for correcting for detector smearing effects using machine learning techniques is presented. Compared to the standard approaches the method can use more than one reconstructed variable to infere the value of the unsmeared quantity on event by event basis. The method is implemented using a sequential neural network with a categorical cross entropy as the loss function. It is tested on a toy example and is shown to satisfy basic closure tests. Possible application of the method for analysis of the data from high energy physics experiments is discussed.
New heterogeneous computing paradigms on dedicated hardware with increased parallelization, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), offer exciting solutions with large potential gains. The growing applications of machine learning algorithms in particle physics for simulation, reconstruction, and analysis are naturally deployed on such platforms. We demonstrate that the acceleration of machine learning inference as a web service represents a heterogeneous computing solution for particle physics experiments that potentially requires minimal modification to the current computing model. As examples, we retrain the ResNet-50 convolutional neural network to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for top quark jet tagging at the LHC and apply a ResNet-50 model with transfer learning for neutrino event classification. Using Project Brainwave by Microsoft to accelerate the ResNet-50 image classification model, we achieve average inference times of 60 (10) milliseconds with our experimental physics software framework using Brainwave as a cloud (edge or on-premises) service, representing an improvement by a factor of approximately 30 (175) in model inference latency over traditional CPU inference in current experimental hardware. A single FPGA service accessed by many CPUs achieves a throughput of 600--700 inferences per second using an image batch of one, comparable to large batch-size GPU throughput and significantly better than small batch-size GPU throughput. Deployed as an edge or cloud service for the particle physics computing model, coprocessor accelerators can have a higher duty cycle and are potentially much more cost-effective.
A selection of unfolding methods commonly used in High Energy Physics is compared. The methods discussed here are: bin-by-bin correction factors, matrix inversion, template fit, Tikhonov regularisation and two examples of iterative methods. Two procedures to choose the strength of the regularisation are tested, namely the L-curve scan and a scan of global correlation coefficients. The advantages and disadvantages of the unfolding methods and choices of the regularisation strength are discussed using a toy example.
The many ways in which machine and deep learning are transforming the analysis and simulation of data in particle physics are reviewed. The main methods based on boosted decision trees and various types of neural networks are introduced, and cutting-edge applications in the experimental and theoretical/phenomenological domains are highlighted. After describing the challenges in the application of these novel analysis techniques, the review concludes by discussing the interactions between physics and machine learning as a two-way street enriching both disciplines and helping to meet the present and future challenges of data-intensive science at the energy and intensity frontiers.
A number of scientific competitions have been organised in the last few years with the objective of discovering innovative techniques to perform typical High Energy Physics tasks, like event reconstruction, classification and new physics discovery. Four of these competitions are summarised in this chapter, from which guidelines on organising such events are derived. In addition, a choice of competition platforms and available datasets are described
In this paper we describe RooFitUnfold, an extension of the RooFit statistical software package to treat unfolding problems, and which includes most of the unfolding methods that commonly used in particle physics. The package provides a common interface to these algorithms as well as common uniform methods to evaluate their performance in terms of bias, variance and coverage. In this paper we exploit this common interface of RooFitUnfold to compare the performance of unfolding with the Richardson-Lucy, Iterative Dynamically Stabilized, Tikhonov, Gaussian Process, Bin-by-bin and inversion methods on several example problems.