NAE, Statistically

Abstract

Searches for new physics using neural anomaly scores have transformative potential, but suffer from a lack of statistical interpretability. The normalized autoencoder (NAE) provides a probabilistic interpretation of the standard bottleneck architecture, tying the anomaly score to a learned likelihood. We validate this relation for a toy model, test it for jets using a dual-NAE setup, and show how a Bayesian NAE learns this likelihood with an uncertainty.