Package: madminer
MadMiner: ML based inference for particle physicsBy Johann Brehmer, Felix Kling, Irina Espejo, Sinclert Pérez, and Kyle CranmerIntroductionParticle physics processes are usually modeled with complex Monte-Carlo simulations of the hard process, parton shower,
and detector interactions. These simulators typically do not admit a tractable likelihood function: given a (potentially
high-dimensional) set of observables, it is usually not possible to calculate the probability of these observables
for some model parameters. Particle physicists usually tackle this problem of "likelihood-free inference" by
hand-picking a few "good" observables or summary statistics and filling histograms of them. But this conventional
approach discards the information in all other observables and often does not scale well to high-dimensional problems.In the three publications"Constraining Effective Field Theories with Machine Learning","A Guide to Constraining Effective Field Theories with Machine Learning", and"Mining gold from implicit models to improve likelihood-free inference",
a new approach has been developed. In a nutshell, additional information is extracted from the simulations that is
closely related to the matrix elements that determine the hard process. This "augmented data" can be used to train
neural networks to efficiently approximate arbitrary likelihood ratios. We playfully call this process "mining gold"
from the simulator, since this information may be hard to get, but turns out to be very valuable for inference.But the gold does not have to be hard to mine: MadMiner automates these modern multivariate inference strategies. It
wraps around the simulators MadGraph and Pythia, with different options for the detector simulation. It streamlines all
steps in the analysis chain from the simulation to the extraction of the augmented data, their processing, the training
and evaluation of the neural networks, and the statistical analysis are implemented.ResourcesPaperOur main publicationMadMiner: Machine-learning-based inference for particle physicsprovides an overview over this package. We recommend reading it first before jumping into the code.Installation instructionsPlease have a look at ourinstallation instructions.TutorialsIn theexamplesfolder in this repository, we provide two tutorials. The first is calledToy simulator, and it is based on a toy problem rather than a full particle-physics simulation.
It demonstrates inference with MadMiner without spending much time on the more technical steps of running the simulation.
The second, calledParticle physics, shows all steps of a particle-physics analysis with MadMiner.These examples are the basis ofthe online tutorialbuilt on Jupyter Books. It also walks
through how to run MadMiner using Docker so that you do not have to install Fortran, MadGraph, Pythia, Delphes, etc.
You can even run it with no install using Binder.DocumentationThe madminer API is documented onRead the Docs.SupportIf you have any questions, please chat to us in ourGitter community.CitationsIf you use MadMiner, please cite our main publication,@article{Brehmer:2019xox,
      author         = "Brehmer, Johann and Kling, Felix and Espejo, Irina and Cranmer, Kyle",
      title          = "{MadMiner: Machine learning-based inference for particle physics}",
      journal        = "Comput. Softw. Big Sci.",
      volume         = "4",
      year           = "2020",
      number         = "1",
      pages          = "3",
      doi            = "10.1007/s41781-020-0035-2",
      eprint         = "1907.10621",
      archivePrefix  = "arXiv",
      primaryClass   = "hep-ph",
      SLACcitation   = "%%CITATION = ARXIV:1907.10621;%%"
}The code itself can be cited as@misc{MadMiner_code,
      author         = "Brehmer, Johann and Kling, Felix and Espejo, Irina and Perez, Sinclert and Cranmer, Kyle",
      title          = "{MadMiner}",
      doi            = "10.5281/zenodo.1489147",
      url            = {https://github.com/madminer-tool/madminer}
}The main references for the implemented inference techniques are the following:CARL:1506.02169.MAF:1705.07057.CASCAL, RASCAL, ROLR, SALLY, SALLINO, SCANDAL:1805.00013.1805.00020.1805.12244.ALICE, ALICES:1808.00973.AcknowledgementsWe are immensely grateful to allcontributorsand bug reporters! In particular, we would like
to thank Zubair Bhatti, Philipp Englert, Lukas Heinrich, Alexander Held, Samuel Homiller and Duccio Pappadopulo.The SCANDAL inference method is based onMasked Autoregressive Flows, where our implementation is
a PyTorch port of the original code by George Papamakarios, available atthis repository.We are grateful for the support ofIRIS-HEPandDIANA-HEP.