Comparison Of Multi-variate Discriminants
The problem of classifying elements of a data set as belonging to one class or another, depending on their characteristics, is a very, very well-studied one, and one which is particularly important in particle physics. Imagine, for instance, that you collect events with four high-transverse-momentum leptons (electrons or muons) with the ATLAS or CMS detector, and you wish to sort out which of these fit better to the hypothesis of being originated by Higgs boson decay into two Z bosons (with each Z boson in turn producing a lepton pair) rather than to the alternative hypothesis of being due to the incoherent production of a pair of Z bosons -a process that has nothing to do with Higgs bosons. This means you need to classify the data events using their observed features. read more