Communicating Likelihoods with Normalising Flows
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2025-02-14 v1 Machine Learning
High Energy Physics - Experiment
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Abstract
We present a machine-learning-based workflow to model an unbinned likelihood from its samples. A key advancement over existing approaches is the validation of the learned likelihood using rigorous statistical tests of the joint distribution, such as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of the joint distribution. Our method enables the reliable communication of experimental and phenomenological likelihoods for subsequent analyses. We demonstrate its effectiveness through three case studies in high-energy physics. To support broader adoption, we provide an open-source reference implementation, nabu.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.09494,
title = {Communicating Likelihoods with Normalising Flows},
author = {Jack Y. Araz and Anja Beck and Méril Reboud and Michael Spannowsky and Danny van Dyk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09494},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
4 pages + references, 1 figure