{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/criteria-for-projected-discovery-and","title":"Criteria for projected discovery and exclusion sensitivities of counting experiments","arxiv_id":"2009.07249","date":"2020-09-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Prudhvi N. Bhattiprolu","Stephen P. Martin","James D. Wells"],"abstract":"The projected discovery and exclusion capabilities of particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology experiments are often quantified using the median expected $p$-value or its corresponding significance. We argue that this criterion leads to flawed results, which for example can counterintuitively project lessened sensitivities if the experiment takes more data or reduces its background. We discuss the merits of several alternatives to the median expected significance, both when the background is known and when it is subject to some uncertainty. We advocate for standard use of the \"exact Asimov significance\" $Z^{\\rm A}$ detailed in this paper.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07249v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.07249v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"criteria-for-projected-discovery-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/prudhvibhattiprolu/Zstats","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}