Related papers: Reference analysis of the signal + background mode…
The objective Bayesian treatment of a model representing two independent Poisson processes, labelled as "signal" and "background" and both contributing additively to the total number of counted events, is considered. It is shown that the…
Searches for faint signals in counting experiments are often encountered in particle physics and astrophysics, as well as in other fields. Many problems can be reduced to the case of a model with independent and Poisson-distributed signal…
The paper addresses general aspects of experimental data analysis, dealing with the separation of ``signal vs. background''. It consists of two parts. Part I is a tutorial on statistical event classification, Bayesian inference, and test…
Searching for evidence of neutrino oscillations is an important problem in particle physics. Suppose that evidence for neutrino oscillations from an LSND experiment reports a significant positive oscillation probability, but that the LSND…
In this paper we propose a procedure to evaluate Bayesian confidence intervals in counting experiments where both signal and background fluctuations are described by the Poisson statistics. The results obtained when the method is applied to…
For decades researchers have studied the On/Off counting problem, where a measured rate consists of two parts. One due to a signal process and another due to a background process, of which both magnitudes are unknown. While most frequentist…
Background channels with their expected strength and uncertainty levels are usually known in searches of novel phenomena prior to the experiments are conducted at their design stage. We quantitatively study the projected sensitivities in…
We study the application of a Bayesian method to extract relevant information from data for the case of a signal consisting of two or more decaying particles and its background. The method takes advantage of the dependence that exists in…
In high-energy astrophysics, it is common practice to account for the background overlaid with the counts from the source of interest with the help of auxiliary measurements carried on by pointing off-source. In this "on/off" measurement,…
Signal estimation in the presence of background noise is a common problem in several scientific disciplines. An 'On/Off' measurement is performed when the background itself is not known, being estimated from a background control sample. The…
In this note, an alternative for presenting the distribution of `significant' events in searches for new phenomena is described. The alternative is based on probability density functions used in the evaluation of the `significance' of an…
The estimation of signal frequency count in the presence of background noise has had much discussion in the recent physics literature, and Mandelkern [1] brings the central issues to the statistical community, leading in turn to extensive…
The problem of inferring the binomial parameter p from x successes obtained in n trials is reviewed and extended to take into account the presence of background, that can affect the data in two ways: a) fake successes are due to a…
A results of numerical procedure for construction of confidence intervals for parameter of Poisson distribution for signal in the presence of background which has Poisson distribution with known value of parameter are presented. It is shown…
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…
The analysis of count data is commonly done using Poisson models. Negative binomial models are a straightforward and readily motivated generalization for the case of overdispersed data, i.e., when the observed variance is greater than…
A suggestion is made for improving the Feldman Cousins method of estimating signal counts in the presence of background. The method concentrates on finding essential information about the signal and ignoring extraneous information about…
We present a procedure for calculating an upper limit on the number of signal events which incorporates the Poisson uncertainty in the background, estimated from control regions of one or two dimensions. For small number of signal events,…
We investigate Bayesian and frequentist approaches to resonance searches using a toy model based on an ATLAS search for the Higgs boson in the diphoton channel. We draw pseudo-data from the background only model and background plus signal…
Bayesian inferences in high energy physics often use uniform prior distributions for parameters about which little or no information is available before data are collected. The resulting posterior distributions are therefore sensitive to…