Improving Stability of Discovery Significance in Higgs Boson Event Classification using Contrastive Representation Learning
摘要
Higgs boson searches at the Large Hadron Collider require event selection methods that maximise discovery significance while maintaining reliable performance across varying data conditions. Machine learning models trained to optimise significance-based metrics can produce unstable decision thresholds and inconsistent results across validation splits, potentially affecting the robustness of experimental conclusions. This study investigates whether supervised contrastive representation learning can improve the stability of classification in significance-driven analyses using the HiggsML benchmark dataset of simulated