Reference Priors for High Energy Physics

August 2, 2010

Bayesian inferences in high energy physics often use uniform prior distributions for parameters about which little or no information is available before data are collected. The resulting posterior distributions are therefore sensitive to the choice of parametrization for the problem and may even be improper if this choice is not carefully considered. Here we describe an extensively tested methodology, known as reference analysis, which allows one to construct parametrization-invariant priors that embody the notion of minimal informativeness in a mathematically well-defined sense. We apply this methodology to general cross section measurements and show that it yields sensible results. A recent measurement of the single-top quark cross section illustrates the relevant techniques in a realistic situation.

The full paper, written in collaboration with Supriya Jain and Harrison Prosper, is available on the arXiv at arxiv.org/pdf/1002.1111v2.pdf. It was published in the journal Physical Review D, see Phys. Rev. D 82, 034002 (2010).

The publication of the paper generated a comment by Dieter Grientschnig and Ignacio Lira, see Phys. Rev. D 84, 118501 (2011).

My co-authors and I then published a reply, see Phys. Rev. D 84, 118502 (2011). It can be downloaded here.