Related papers: Frequentist Hypothesis Testing with Background Unc…

We construct uncertainty intervals for weak Poisson signals in the presence of background. We consider the case where a primary experiment yields a realization of the signal plus background, and a second experiment yields a realization of…

Hypothesis tests for the presence of new sources of Poisson counts amidst background processes are frequently performed in high energy physics (HEP), gamma ray astronomy (GRA), and other branches of science. While there are conceptual…

One way to incorporate systematic uncertainties into the calculation of confidence intervals is by integrating over probability density functions parametrizing the uncertainties. In this note we present a development of this method which…

In high energy physics, a widely used method to treat systematic uncertainties in confidence interval calculations is based on combining a frequentist construction of confidence belts with a Bayesian treatment of systematic uncertainties.…

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…

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…

Confidence intervals for a binomial parameter or for the ratio of Poisson means are commonly desired in high energy physics (HEP) applications such as measuring a detection efficiency or branching ratio. Due to the discreteness of the data,…

The incorporation of systematic uncertainties into confidence interval calculations has been addressed recently in a paper by Conrad et al. (Physical Review D 67 (2003) 012002). In their work, systematic uncertainities in detector…

In particle physics and cosmology, distinguishing subtle new physics signals from established backgrounds is a fundamental and persistent challenge for phenomenologists. This paper discuss a simple and robust statistical framework to…

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…

We consider the problem of hypotheses testing with the basic simple hypothesis: observed sequence of points corresponds to stationary Poisson process with known intensity. The alternatives are stationary self-exciting point processes. We…

The incorporation of uncertainties to calculations of signal significance in planned experiments is an actual task. Several approaches to this problem are discussed. We present a procedure for taking into account the systematic uncertainty…

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…

Prompt isolated leptons are essential in many analyses in high-energy particle physics but are subject to fake-lepton background, i.e. objects that mimic the lepton signature. The fake-lepton background is difficult to estimate from…

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…

We consider the problem of hypotheses testing with the basic simple hypothesis: observed sequence of points corresponds to stationary Poisson process with known intensity against a composite one-sided parametric alternative that this is a…

Particle physics experiments rely on the (generalised) likelihood ratio test (LRT) for searches and measurements, which consist of composite hypothesis tests. However, this test is not guaranteed to be optimal, as the Neyman-Pearson lemma…

This paper explores conditions of existence of different types of consistent tests. New links of these types of consistency are also established. The existence of discernible (strong consistent) tests follows from the existence of pointwise…

Several statistics used by physicists to declare the signal observability over the background are compared. It is shown that the frequentist method of testing a precise hypothesis allows one to estimate the power value of criteria with…

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,…