English

OmniFold: A Method to Simultaneously Unfold All Observables

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2020-05-13 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Machine Learning

Abstract

Collider data must be corrected for detector effects ("unfolded") to be compared with many theoretical calculations and measurements from other experiments. Unfolding is traditionally done for individual, binned observables without including all information relevant for characterizing the detector response. We introduce OmniFold, an unfolding method that iteratively reweights a simulated dataset, using machine learning to capitalize on all available information. Our approach is unbinned, works for arbitrarily high-dimensional data, and naturally incorporates information from the full phase space. We illustrate this technique on a realistic jet substructure example from the Large Hadron Collider and compare it to standard binned unfolding methods. This new paradigm enables the simultaneous measurement of all observables, including those not yet invented at the time of the analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.09107,
  title  = {OmniFold: A Method to Simultaneously Unfold All Observables},
  author = {Anders Andreassen and Patrick T. Komiske and Eric M. Metodiev and Benjamin Nachman and Jesse Thaler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09107},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 1 poem; v2: updated to approximate PRL version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:22:40.159Z