Related papers: On a chi^2-function with previously estimated back…
In measuring the $\psip$ radiative decays at BESII, contribution of the background is serious in most of the final states. To extract the number of signal events, a fit to the $\chi^2$ distribution of kinematic fit using signal and…
The model representing two independent Poisson processes, labelled as "signal" and "background" and both contributing at the same time to the total number of counted events, is considered from a Bayesian point of view. This is a widely used…
Traditional binned statistics such as $\chi^2$ suffer from information loss and arbitrariness of the binning procedure. We point out that the underlying statistical quantity (the log likelihood $L$) does not require any binning beyond the…
Straightforward methods for adapting the familiar chi^2 statistic to histograms of discrete events and other Poisson distributed data generally yield biased estimates of the parameters of a model. The bias can be important even when the…
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…
A typical experiment in high energy physics is considered. The result of the experiment is assumed to be a histogram consisting of bins or channels with numbers of corresponding registered events. The expected background and expected signal…
We demonstrate that two approximations to the chi^2 statistic as popularly employed by observational astronomers for fitting Poisson-distributed data can give rise to intrinsically biased model parameter estimates, even in the high counts…
When fitting theory to data in the presence of background uncertainties, the question of whether the spectral shape of the background happens to be similar to that of the theoretical model of physical interest has not generally been…
We consider the problem of setting confidence intervals on a parameter of interest from the maximum-likelihood fit of a physics model to a binned data set with a large number of bins, large event-counts per bin, and in the presence of…
In the real world, experimental data are rarely, if ever, distributed as a normal (Gaussian) distribution. As an example, a large set of data--such as the cross sections for particle scattering as a function of energy contained in the…
Maximum likelihood fits to data can be performed using binned data and unbinned data. The likelihood fits in either case produce only the fitted quantities but not the goodness of fit. With binned data, one can obtain a measure of the…
We introduce a new kind of likelihood function based on the sequence of moments of the data distribution. Both binned and unbinned data samples are discussed, and the multivariate case is also derived. Building on this approach we lay out…
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 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…
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 likelihood ratio statistic, with its asymptotic $\chi^2$ distribution at regular model points, is often used for hypothesis testing. At model singularities and boundaries, however, the asymptotic distribution may not be $\chi^2$, as…
Unfolding is an important procedure in particle physics experiments which corrects for detector effects and provides differential cross section measurements that can be used for a number of downstream tasks, such as extracting fundamental…
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 problem of data-driven background estimation, arising in the search of physics signals predicted by the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider. Our work is motivated by the search for the production of pairs of Higgs…