Papers › Analytic Confidence Level Calculations using the Likelihood Ratio and Fourier Transform

Analytic Confidence Level Calculations using the Likelihood Ratio and Fourier Transform

4 Jun 1999arXiv:physics/9906010links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Hongbo Hu, Jason Nielsen

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

The interpretation of new particle search results involves a confidence level calculation on either the discovery hypothesis or the background-only ("null") hypothesis. A typical approach uses toy Monte Carlo experiments to build an expected experiment estimator distribution against which an observed experiment's estimator may be compared. In this note, a new approach is presented which calculates analytically the experiment estimator distribution via a Fourier transform, using the likelihood ratio as an ordering estimator. The analytic approach enjoys an enormous speed advantage over the toy Monte Carlo method, making it possible to quickly and precisely calculate confidence level results.

PaperPDFCode

Code

cranmer/poisson-convolution-sum mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections