Is This Collision a Higgs Boson?
Does this simulated collision contain a Higgs boson, or is it background that only looks similar? Separating the two is the first filter in any search for new particles.
The table
Simulated particle collisions with the measured momentum of each particle and a set of derived masses, labelled signal or background. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Higgs Boson Detection Data (Monte Carlo Simulation), 98,050 rows by 29 columns, licensed Public. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.63. At 98,050 rows and 28 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 4,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="Higgs boson detection", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 4,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(4000, random_state=7)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features), "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "Higgs boson detection", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Science
- Question
- Is This Collision a Higgs Boson?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- Higgs Boson Detection Data (Monte Carlo Simulation), 98,050 rows
- For
- Particle physicists and ML researchers
- Licence
- Public