Open Issues in the Wake of Banff 2010

September 27, 2011

We review, in some cases very succinctly, statistical issues in the formulation of discovery procedures for high energy physics. This includes alternatives to p-value tests, the look-elsewhere effect, measurement sensitivity, implicit statistical models, parton density uncertainties, reference priors, profile likelihood methods, and extreme value theory.

This paper was published in “Proceedings of the PHYSTAT 2011 Workshop on Statistical Issues Related to Discovery Claims in Search Experiments and Unfolding,” CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 17-20 January 2011, edited by H. B. Prosper and L. Lyons, CERN-2011-006, pp. 1-11.

It can be downloaded here.