Class Imbalance Techniques for High Energy Physics
This work addresses signal extraction challenges for high energy physics researchers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing techniques without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of class imbalance in high energy physics classification tasks, such as extracting signals from larger backgrounds, by providing an overview of techniques and presenting two case studies on specific measurements.
A common problem in a high energy physics experiment is extracting a signal from a much larger background. Posed as a classification task, there is said to be an imbalance in the number of samples belonging to the signal class versus the number of samples from the background class. In this work we provide a brief overview of class imbalance techniques in a high energy physics setting. Two case studies are presented: (1) the measurement of the longitudinal polarization fraction in same-sign $WW$ scattering, and (2) the decay of the Higgs boson to charm-quark pairs.