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This is what every Multivariate Analysis (MVA) discriminator does. The discriminant output, also called discriminator, score, or classifier, is used as a test statistic and is then adopted to perform the signal selection. It could be used as a variable on which a cut can be applied under a particular hypothesis test.
In particular, Machine Learning tools are models that have enough capacity to define their own internal representation of the data to accomplish a taskto accomplish two main tasks: learning from data and make predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so.
In the case of binary classification, firstly the algorithm is trained with two datasets:
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