Photon Classification with Gradient Boosted Trees at CLAS12

Dihadron semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS) of 10.6 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons off the proton has been measured using the CLAS12 detector at Jefferson Lab. Two separate channels, π⁺π⁰ and π⁻π⁰, were analyzed, requiring the reconstruction of diphoton pairs. In this analysis, we addressed the problem of false neutral particles being reconstructed by CLAS12's event builder, polluting the otherwise physical combinatorial background underneath the π⁰ peak. A photon classifier using a Gradient Boosted Trees (GBTs) architecture was trained with Monte Carlo simulations to reduce the amount of background π⁰'s. We show that the nearest-neighbor features learned by the model lead to a substantial increase in signal vs. background discrimination compared to previous CLAS12 π⁰ analyses. The machine learning approach recovers several times more dihadron statistics for the dataset.