Discovering Neutrinos through Data Analytics

10/26/2020

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by   Katharina Morik, et al.

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Astrophysical experiments produce Big Data which need efficient and effective data analytics. In this paper we present a general data analysis process which has been successfully applied to data from IceCube, a cubic kilometer neutrino detector located at the geographic South Pole. The goal of the analysis is to separate neutrinos from atmospheric muons within the data to determine the muon neutrino energy spectrum. The presented process covers straight cuts, variable selection, classification, and unfolding. A major challenge in the separation is the unbalanced dataset. The expected signal to background ratio in the initial data (trigger level) is roughly 1:106 . The overall process was embedded in a multi-fold cross-validation to control its performance. A subsequent regularized unfolding yields the sought after neutrino energy spectrum.