English

Testing Consistency of Two Histograms

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2008-04-03 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment Methodology

Abstract

Several approaches to testing the hypothesis that two histograms are drawn from the same distribution are investigated. We note that single-sample continuous distribution tests may be adapted to this two-sample grouped data situation. The difficulty of not having a fully-specified null hypothesis is an important consideration in the general case, and care is required in estimating probabilities with ``toy'' Monte Carlo simulations. The performance of several common tests is compared; no single test performs best in all situations.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.0380,
  title  = {Testing Consistency of Two Histograms},
  author = {Frank C. Porter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.0380},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

35 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables. Plain TeX. Uses graphicx external package. For better quality figures, go to: http://www.hep.caltech.edu/~fcp/statistics/hypothesisTest/PoissonConsistency/PoissonConsistency.pdf

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:27:02.562Z