Identifying electrons with deep learning methods
This thesis is about applying the tools of Machine Learning to an important problem of experimental particle physics: identifying signal electrons after proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. In Chapters 1, we provide some information about the Large Hadron Collider and explain why it was built. We give further details about one of the biggest detectors in the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS. Then we define what electron identification task is, as well as the importance of solving it. Finally, we give detailed information about our dataset that we use to solve the electron identification task. In Chapters 2, we give a brief introduction to fundamental principles of machine learning. Starting with the definition and types of different learning tasks, we discuss various ways to represent inputs. Then we present what to learn from the inputs as well as how to do it. And finally, we look at the problems that would arise if we “overdo” learning. In Chapters 3, we motivate the choice of the architecture to solve our task, especially for the parts that have sequential images as inputs. We then present the results of our experiments and show that our model performs much better than the existing algorithms that the ATLAS collaboration currently uses. Finally, we discuss future directions to further improve our results. In Chapter 4, we discuss two concepts: out of distribution generalization and flatness of loss surface. We claim that the algorithms, that brings a model into a wide flat minimum of its training loss surface, would generalize better for out of distribution tasks. We give the results of implementing two such algorithms to our dataset and show that it supports our claim. Finally, we end with our conclusions.
Neural networks Machine learning Deep learning Supervised learning