Second PHYSTAT Workshop on "Statistics meets ML" in Particle Physics & Astrophysics
In recent years, ML has become more and more integrated into many stages of our analyses. In Particle Physics, it includes data collection and processing (triggering, tracking, etc), classification of different particle types, unfolding, parameter determination, anomaly detection, and even end-to-end processing. In astronomy its use is increasingly widespread in areas such as classification of objects, distance determination, and regression problems. It is used theoretically to enhance simulations, and in emulation of theoretical predictions that are expensive to compute. It is also increasingly used in simulation-based inference, both in finding informative summary statistics, and in variational methods of inference.
PHYSTAT’s first “Statistics meets Machine Learning” aimed to address some of the statistical issues that arise in these applications in Particle Physics and in Astronomy, with participation also of Statistics and Machine Learning experts. These issues are particularly important as the ML approaches tend to outperform traditional ones in terms of precision; the question is whether they are also more accurate. A problem is that in general it is hard to understand the procedure the ML method is adopting to achieve its result.
The second workshop will address topics identified in the first workshop and will present new work on these topics. This includes
- Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization
- Uncertainty quantification
- Model robustness
- Inference & Parameter Estimation
- Generative Models & statistical validation
- Hypothesis Testing & Statistical Discovery
- Model Selection, Interpretability & Exp.
- Information Theory and Data representation
- Symbolic ML
There will be plenty of time for discussion.
The meeting will be hybrid i.e. participation either in person or remotely. In both cases, registration is necessary as the zoom link to the meeting will be sent a few days before the meeting only to people who have registered.
In-person registration cost €50 to cover coffee and lunch costs. There was a limit of 80 for the number of in-person participants.
PHYSTAT
The PHYSTAT series of Workshops started in 2000. They were the first meetings devoted solely to the statistical issues that occur in analyses in Particle Physics and neighbouring fields.The homepage of PHYSTAT with a list of all Workshops, Seminars and Informal Reviews is at https://phystat.github.io/Website/ .
