Finding the Higgs boson – case study
In this section, we will review the Higgs Boson Kaggle Competition, which brought XGBoost into the machine learning spotlight. In order to set the stage, the historical background is given before moving on to model development. The models that we build include a default model provided by XGBoost at the time of the competition and a reference to the winning solution provided by Gabor Melis. Kaggle accounts are not required for this text, so we will not take the time to show you how to make submissions. We have provided guidelines if you are interested.
Physics background
In popular culture, the Higgs boson is known as the God particle. Theorized by Peter Higgs in 1964, the Higgs boson was introduced to explain why particles have mass.
The search to find the Higgs boson culminated in its discovery in 2012 in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). Nobel Prizes were awarded and the Standard Model of physics, the model...
