Speaker
Dr
Maria Grazia Pia
(INFN Genova)
Description
The Statistical Toolkit provides an extensive collection of algorithms for the
comparison of two data samples: in addition to the chisquared test, it includes all
the tests based on the empirical distribution function documented in literature for
binned and unbinned distributions.
Some of these tests, like the Kolmogorov-Smirnov one, are widely used; others, like
the Anderson-Darling or the Cramer-von Mises tests, have been previously used in more
sophisticated physics data analyses; nevertheless, several of the tests in the
Statistical Toolkit are largely unknown in high energy physics applications, and a
few of them, like the weighted formulations of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, are
available for the first time in an open-source software tool for statistical analysis.
No systematic evaluation of the power of the goodness-of-fit tests has been
documented so far in literature. The present work presents a comprehensive study of
the power of all the goodness-of-fit tests in rich collection of the Statistical
Toolkit in a variety of use cases specific to high energy physics experiments; it
highlights the relative merits and deficiencies of the algorithms to deal with
peculiar characteristics of the configurations under study. The results of this study
provide guidance for the selection of the most appropriate algorithm in experimental
analyses.
The Statistical Toolkit user layer is interfaced to AIDA-compliant analysis tools and
to ROOT.
Primary authors
Dr
Alberto Ribon
(CERN)
Dr
Andreas Pfeiffer
(CERN)
Dr
Maria Grazia Pia
(INFN Genova)
Dr
Paolo Viarengo
(Univ. Napoli)
