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Improved Asymptotic Formulae for Statistical Interpretation Based on Likelihood Ratio Tests

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2025-07-29 v8 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

In this work, we attempt to refine the classic asymptotic formulae to describe the probability distribution of likelihood-ratio statistical tests. The idea is to split the probability distribution function into two parts. One part is universal and described by the asymptotic formulae. The other part is case-dependent and is estimated explicitly using a 6-bin model proposed in this work. The latter is similar to performing toy simulations and can therefore predict the discrete structures in the probability distributions. The new asymptotic formulae provide a much better differential description of the test statistics. This improved performance is demonstrated in two toy examples for common likelihood ratio statistics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.06944,
  title  = {Improved Asymptotic Formulae for Statistical Interpretation Based on Likelihood Ratio Tests},
  author = {Li-Gang Xia and Yan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06944},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

version accepted for publication in Physica Scripta. Welcome to try it in your analysis and feedback. Thank you!

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:15:53.756Z