Related papers: Statistical Issues in Searches for New Physics
Because the emphasis of the LHC is on 5 sigma discoveries and the LHC environment induces high systematic errors, many of the common statistical procedures used in High Energy Physics are not adequate. I review the basic ingredients of LHC…
Accelerators and detectors are expensive, both in terms of money and human effort. It is thus important to invest effort in performing a good statistical analysis of the data, in order to extract the best information from it. This series of…
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…
These lectures describe several topics in statistical data analysis as used in High Energy Physics. They focus on areas most relevant to analyses at the LHC that search for new physical phenomena, including statistical tests for discovery…
Various statistical issues relevant to searches for new physics or to parameter determination in analyses of data in neutrino experiments are briefly discussed.
An account is given of the methods of working of Experimental High Energy Particle Physics, from the viewpoint of statisticians and others unfamiliar with the field. Current statistical problems, techniques, and hot topics are introduced…
In the next decade, high energy physicists will use very sophisticated equipment to record unprecedented amounts of data in the hope of making major advances in our understanding of particle phenomena. Some of the signals of new physics…
This is the write-up of a set of lectures given at the Asia Europe Pacific School of High Energy Physics in Quy Nhon, Vietnam in September 2018, to an audience of PhD students in all branches of particle physics They cover the different…
These three lectures provide an introduction to the main concepts of statistical data analysis useful for precision measurements and searches for new signals in High Energy Physics. The frequentist and Bayesian approaches to probability…
Many statistical issues arise in the analysis of Particle Physics experiments. We give a brief introduction to Particle Physics, before describing the techniques used by Particle Physicists for dealing with statistical problems, and also…
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…
Particle physics experiments use likelihood ratio tests extensively to compare hypotheses and to construct confidence intervals. Often, the null distribution of the likelihood ratio test statistic is approximated by a $\chi^2$ distribution,…
In high-energy physics (HEP), both the exclusion and discovery of new theories depend not only on the acquisition of high-quality experimental data but also on the rigorous application of statistical methods. These methods provide…
The massive data sets from today's particle physics experiments present a variety of challenges amenable to the tools developed by the statistics community. From the real-time decision of what subset of data to record on permanent storage,…
Searches for New Physics focus either on the direct production of new particles at colliders or at deviations from known observables at low energies. In order to discover New Physics in precision measurements, both experimental and…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
We propose a method to estimate the probability of new physics discovery in future high energy physics experiments. Physics simulation gives both the average numbers <Nb> of background and <Ns> of signal events. We find that the proper…
In this review statistical issues appearing in astrophysical searches for particle dark matter, i.e. indirect detection (dark matter annihilating into standard model particles) or direct detection (dark matter particles scattering in deep…
We describe likelihood-based statistical tests for use in high energy physics for the discovery of new phenomena and for construction of confidence intervals on model parameters. We focus on the properties of the test procedures that allow…
We have developed an algorithm for non-parametric fitting and extraction of statistically significant peaks in the presence of statistical and systematic uncertainties. Applications of this algorithm for analysis of high-energy collision…