English

A Test for the Presence of a Signal

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2007-08-29 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We describe a statistical hypothesis test for the presence of a signal based on the likelihood ratio statistic. We derive the test for a case of interest and also show that for that case the test works very well, even far out in the tails of the distribution. We also study extensions of the test to cases where there are multiple channels.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0606006,
  title  = {A Test for the Presence of a Signal},
  author = {Wolfgang A. Rolke and Angel M. Lopez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0606006},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures