Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Pulls

April 8, 2008

This note explains various ways to define a “pull” or “stretch”. It discusses applications of this concept in problems of parameter estimation (constrained and unconstrained fits) and hypothesis testing. Monte Carlo methods are described to characterize pull distributions in situations involving small samples.

This paper, written in collaboration with Louis Lyons, was initially distributed as an internal note to the CDF collaboration at Fermilab. You can download it here.