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Handling uncertainties in background shapes: the discrete profiling method

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Published 28 April 2015 © CERN 2015
, , Citation P.D. Dauncey et al 2015 JINST 10 P04015 DOI 10.1088/1748-0221/10/04/P04015

1748-0221/10/04/P04015

Abstract

A common problem in data analysis is that the functional form, as well as the parameter values, of the underlying model which should describe a dataset is not known a priori. In these cases some extra uncertainty must be assigned to the extracted parameters of interest due to lack of exact knowledge of the functional form of the model. A method for assigning an appropriate error is presented. The method is based on considering the choice of functional form as a discrete nuisance parameter which is profiled in an analogous way to continuous nuisance parameters. The bias and coverage of this method are shown to be good when applied to a realistic example.

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