  The MiniBooNE experiment has reported results from the analysis of $\nu _e$
and $\bar \nu _e$ appearance searches, which show an excess of signal-like
events at low reconstructed neutrino energies, with respect to the expected
background. A significant component of this background comes from photon
emission induced by (anti)neutrino neutral current interactions with nucleons
and nuclei. With an improved microscopic model for these reactions, we predict
the number and distributions of photon events at the MiniBooNE detector. Our
results are compared to the MiniBooNE in situ estimate and to other theoretical
approaches. We find that, according to our model, neutral current photon
emission from single-nucleon currents is insufficient to explain the events
excess observed by MiniBooNE in both neutrino and antineutrino modes.
