Related papers: Is the bump significant? An axion-search example
We present a rigorous description of the general problem of aperture photometry in high energy astrophysics photon-count images, in which the statistical noise model is Poisson, not Gaussian. We compute the full posterior probability…
A theoretical approach for characterising the influence of asymmetry of noise distribution on the escape rate of a multi-stable system is presented. This was carried out via the estimation of an action, which is defined as an exponential…
The intensity statistics of signals in the presence of Gaussian noise is obtained by studying the model of a random signal plus a random phasor sum. The additive Gaussian noise is shown to result in a Bessel transform of the probability…
The search for faint emission or absorption lines in astronomical spectra has received considerable attention in recent years, especially in the X-ray wavelength range. These features usually appear as a deficit or excess of counts in a…
A recent study demonstrated that there is significant covariance structure in the noise on data from ground-based photometric surveys designed to detect transiting extrasolar planets. Such correlation in the noise has often been overlooked,…
Motivated by the problem of testing for the existence of a signal of known parametric structure and unknown ``location'' (as explained below) against a noisy background, we obtain for the maximum of a centered, smooth random field an…
In this letter, we describe a novel scheme for searching for physics beyond the Standard Model. The idea is based on correlation of time-synchronized readouts of distant ($\gtrsim$100~km) optical magnetometers. Such an approach limits…
Resonance searches generally focus on narrow states that would produce a sharp peak rising over background. Early LHC running will, however, be sensitive primarily to broad resonances. In this paper we demonstrate that statistical methods…
This paper studies a problem of Bayesian parameter estimation for a sequence of scaled counting processes whose weak limit is a Brownian motion with an unknown drift. The main result of the paper is that the limit of the posterior…
We provide theoretical and empirical evidence for a type of asymmetry between causes and effects that is present when these are related via linear models contaminated with additive non-Gaussian noise. Assuming that the causes and the…
Particle physics experiments such as those run in the Large Hadron Collider result in huge quantities of data, which are boiled down to a few numbers from which it is hoped that a signal will be detected. We discuss a simple probability…
We present time-resolved measurements of electron transport through a quantum dot. The measurements were performed using a nearby quantum point contact as a charge detector. The rates for tunneling through the two barriers connecting the…
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…
Rare events can potentially occur in many applications. When manifested as opportunities to be exploited, risks to be ameliorated, or certain features to be extracted, such events become of paramount significance. Due to their sporadic…
We study the problem of detecting a random walk on a graph from a sequence of noisy measurements at every node. There are two hypotheses: either every observation is just meaningless zero-mean Gaussian noise, or at each time step exactly…
A brief review of particle physics motivations for axion existence is followed by a discussion of optical observables that can be used for axion detection. It is emphasised that the resonant photon - axion transition can occur in the…
Roy's largest root is a common test statistic in multivariate analysis, statistical signal processing and allied fields. Despite its ubiquity, provision of accurate and tractable approximations to its distribution under the alternative has…
This paper is centered around the approximation of dynamical systems by means of Gaussian processes. To this end, trajectories of such systems must be collected to be used as training data. The measurements of these trajectories are…
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…
Evidence that the Universe may be close to the critical density, required for its expansion eventually to be halted, comes principally from dynamical studies of large-scale structure. These studies either use the observed peculiar velocity…