Dealing with Nuisance Parameters using Machine Learning in High Energy Physics: a Review

Abstract: In this work we discuss the impact of nuisance parameters on the effectiveness of machine learning in high-energy physics problems, and provide a review of techniques that allow to include their effect and reduce their impact in the search for optimal selection criteria and variable transformations. The introduction of nuisance parameters complicates the supervised learning task and its correspondence with the data analysis goal, due to their contribution degrading the model performances in real data, and the necessary addition of uncertainties in the resulting statistical inference. The approaches discussed include nuisance-parameterized models, modified or adversary losses, semi-supervised learning approaches, and inference-aware techniques.