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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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:43:24.900Z