Related papers: Trial factors for the look elsewhere effect in hig…
When searching over a large parameter space for anomalies such as events, peaks, objects, or particles, there is a large probability that spurious signals with seemingly high significance will be found. This is known as the look-elsewhere…
The experimental issue of the search for new particles of unknown mass poses the challenge of exploring a wide interval to look for the usual signatures represented by excess of events above the background. A side effect of such a broad…
In high-energy physics it is a recurring challenge to efficiently and precisely (enough) calculate the global significance of, e.g., a potential new resonance. We propose a new method that models the significance in the search region as a…
A detailed presentation of hypothesis testing is given. The "look elsewhere" effect is illustrated, and a treatment of the trials factor is proposed with the introduction of hypothesis hypertests. An example of such a hypertest is…
Approximating significance scans of searches for new particles in high-energy physics experiments as Gaussian fields is a well-established way to estimate the trials factors required to quantify global significances. We propose a novel,…
While gravitational waves have not yet been measured directly, data analysis from detection experiments commonly includes an upper limit statement. Such upper limits may be derived via a frequentist or Bayesian approach; the theoretical…
In experiments where one searches a large parameter space for an anomaly, one often finds many spurious noise-induced peaks in the likelihood. This is known as the look-elsewhere effect, and must be corrected for when performing statistical…
Several experiments in high-energy physics and astrophysics can be treated as on/off measurements, where an observation potentially containing a new source or effect ("on" measurement) is contrasted with a background-only observation free…
We discuss the use of Gaussian random fields to estimate the look-elsewhere effect correction. We show that Gaussian random fields can be used to model the null-hypothesis significance maps from a large set of statistical problems commonly…
Many experiments in physics involve searching for a localized excess over background expectations in an observed spectrum. If the background is known and there is Gaussian noise, the amount of excess of successive observations can be…
The search for new significant peaks over a energy spectrum often involves a statistical multiple hypothesis testing problem. Separate tests of hypothesis are conducted at different locations producing an ensemble of local p-values, the…
We discuss the use of the Bayesian evidence ratio, or Bayes factor, for model selection in astronomy. We treat the evidence ratio as a statistic and investigate its distribution over an ensemble of experiments, considering both simple…
The "Breakthrough Starshot" program is planning to send transrelativistic probes to travel to nearby stellar systems within decades. Since the probe velocity is designed to be a good fraction of the light speed, \citet{zha18} recently…
Searches for statistically significant correlations between arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and classes of astrophysical objects are common in astroparticle physics. We present a method to test potential correlation…
We discuss two topics on the experimental measurements of fluctuation observables in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. First, we discuss the effects of the thermal blurring, i.e. the blurring effect arising from the experimental…
We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case…
We describe a previously unexplored effect of the continuous spontaneous localization model whereby a correlation develops in the distributions of two nearby non-interacting particles following a period of diffusion. We propose the use of…
Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…
Deviation from standard dispersion relations for electrons and photons in the form of an extra term proportional to an arbitrarily high power of momentum is studied. It is shown that observational constraints lead to a region in the…
In counting experiments, one can set an upper limit on the rate of a Poisson process based on a count of the number of events observed due to the process. In some experiments, one makes several counts of the number of events, using…