Uncovering hidden patterns in collider events with Bayesian probabilistic models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian mixed-membership model, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to identify hidden new physics patterns in collider event data, enabling unsupervised classification of BSM signals from background.

Contribution

It applies LDA, a natural language processing model, to collider physics data for the first time to uncover hidden patterns without labeled data.

Findings

Two-theme LDA can distinguish BSM signals from QCD background

Model successfully identifies hidden physics patterns in unlabelled collider data

Demonstrates effectiveness on primary Lund plane point patterns

Abstract

Individual events at high-energy colliders like the LHC can be represented by a sequence of measurements, or 'point patterns' in an observable space. Starting from this data representation, we build a simple Bayesian probabilistic model for event measurements useful for unsupervised event classification in beyond the standard model (BSM) studies. In order to arrive to this model we assume that the event measurements are exchangeable (and apply De Finetti's representation theorem), the data is discrete, and measurements are generated from multiple 'latent' distributions, called 'themes'. The resulting probabilistic model for collider events is a mixed-membership model known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a model extensively used in natural language processing applications. By training on point patterns in the primary Lund plane, we demonstrate that a two-theme LDA model can learn to distinguish in unlabelled dijet events the hidden new physics patterns produced by a BSM signature from a much larger QCD background. Based on 1904.04200 and 2005.12319.