B0 -> K*0 tau+ tau- Decay: Using Machine Learning to Separate Signal from Background

Abstract

This study investigates the rare decay B0 -> K*0 tau+ tau-, which is sensitive to potential violations of lepton flavor universality predicted by the Standard Model. A Monte Carlo simulated dataset containing both signal and the dominant background process B0 -> K*0 D+ D- was used to train and evaluate machine learning classifiers. After feature selection and parameter tuning, two supervised models -- Boosted Decision Trees (BDTs) and Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNNs) -- were trained. Feature engineering was then applied to enhance classification performance. On the test set, the BDT achieved an AUC of 0.912 +/- 0.000 and an F1-score of 0.828 +/- 0.001, while the FCNN reached an AUC of 0.877 +/- 0.000 and an F1-score of 0.799 +/- 0.001. These results demonstrate that both models can robustly separate signal from background in rare decay searches, supporting their application in future LHCb analyses.

This submission is being withdrawn because it contains experimental data that I included without obtaining the necessary authorization. The data appears in the Results and Discussion section and was not approved for public release