Improving electron/proton discrimination at high energies with CALET on the International Space Station
The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), operating aboard the International Space Station since October 2015, is an experiment dedicated to high-energy astroparticle physics. The primary scientific goal of the experiment is the measurement of the electron+positron flux up to the multi-TeV region. At such high energies, proton contamination - coupled with limited statistics - is the main challenge for this measurement and good electron/proton discrimination can be carried out by using machine learning techniques. So far, we have tested and used only algorithms implemented in the ROOT TMVA package: in particular, the Boosted Decision Tree (BDT) algorithm leads to proton contamination below 10% up to 7.5 TeV with an 80% electron efficiency. In principle, better performance can be achieved by using Python packages, which offer a larger variety of machine learning algorithms and tuning parameters compared to TMVA. In this work, we will present a comparison of the performance obtained with the BDT algorithm implemented in TMVA and Python (XGBoost), while alternative approaches based on neural networks (e.g., Keras) will be explored in future studies.
Authors
- E. Berti (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5841-7760)
- L. Pacini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6808-9396)
- P. Betti (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7097-165X)
- S. Gonzi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4754-645X)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-09-23
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.22323/1.501.0011
- Primary Topic
- Photocathodes and Microchannel Plates
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- University of Chicago
- Nihon University
- Louisiana State University
- University of Denver
- Università degli Studi di Siena
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
- Università degli Studi di Padova
- Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
- Waseda University
- Università degli Studi di Firenze
- University of Tokyo
- Aoyama Gakuin University
- Ritsumeikan University
- Hirosaki University
- Kanagawa University
- National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
- High Energy Accelerator Research Organization
- Università di Pisa
- Iran Telecommunication Research Center
- Tokyo Metropolitan University
- Goddard Space Flight Center
- College of Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
- National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
- Institute of Space and Astronautical Science