Trial factors for the look elsewhere effect in high energy physics

By E. Gross, O. Vitells. 2010

515 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When searching for a new resonance somewhere in a possible mass range, the significance of observing a local excess of events must take into account the probability of observing such an excess anywhere in the range. This is the so called “look elsewhere effect”. The effect can be quantified in terms of a trial factor, which is the ratio between the probability of observing the excess at some fixed mass point, to the probability of observing it anywhere in the range. We propose a simple and fast procedure for estimating the trial factor, based on earlier results by Davies. We show that asymptotically, the trial factor grows linearly with the (fixed mass) significance.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecb4e41ad56e00454e2875f0665e6e52db76d7ec

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Fermi LAT Search for Internal Bremsstrahlung Signatures from Dark Matter Annihilation (2012, background): “[77]); the remaining four trials are associated with the four target regions.”
The Ups and Downs of Early Dark Energy solutions to the Hubble tension: A review of models, hints and constraints circa 2023 (2023, background): “[184] Eilam Gross and Ofer Vitells, “Trial factors for the look elsewhere effect in high energy physics,” Eur.”
Search for the standard model Higgs boson decaying into two photons in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV (2012, background): “Since a fluctuation of the background could occur at any point in the mass range there is a look-elsewhere effect [68].”
POWER ASYMMETRY IN WMAP AND PLANCK TEMPERATURE SKY MAPS AS MEASURED BY A LOCAL VARIANCE ESTIMATOR (2014, background): “Therefore the look-elsewhere effect must be taken care of by taking into account the probability of observing a similar excess anywhere in the range (see, e.g., Gross & Vitells 2010). simply be the product of so-called a posteriori statistical inference10 (see, e.g., Bennett et al. 2011).”
Asymptotic formulae for likelihood-based tests of new physics (2010, unknown): “[14].”
A Tentative Gamma-Ray Line from Dark Matter Annihilation at the Fermi Large Area Telescope (2012, background): “[71] (related to the number of upcrossings), and k = 2 is in our case the theoretical expectation for the tail of the distribution.”