YETI'07: Statistical methods

Europe/London
IPPP

IPPP

Description
The Young Experimentalists and Theorists Institute aims to gather UK HEP aims to promote interaction between the two halves of the PP community at the early career stage and encourage interest in phenomenology. Talks and discussion sessions are at a non-expert/intermediate level. The theme of YETI'07 is the statistical treatment of data with the emphasis on methods used for the analysis of small samples, e.g. confidence intervals and limit setting. A thorough knowledge of statistical methods and their limitations is vital for the analysis of data and for determining the significance of a signal that might lead to a discovery. Furthermore, future discoveries are likely to rely heavily on methods that can be used to treat low statistics samples as most signals of interest come from rare decays that have to be extracted from a large-background environment. Many students' graduate physics courses cover statistical methods to some degree, but even these students often find themselves lacking the tools they need for their specific problem or are unsure about the region of applicability of the methods they have learnt. YETI'07 aims to give all students a solid understanding of the statistical methods required in most particle physics analyses. An introductory set of lectures will be given by Dr. Glen Cowan which will be supplemented by hands-on training in standard computational tools like ROOT and MINUIT led by Dr Adrian Bevan. Talks from members of various experiments who will demonstrate how statistical methods are applied in practice to real data in small statistics analyses, e.g. Higgs-like events at LEP, rare B decays at BaBar, extra dimension searches at the Tevatron/LHC and isolated leptons at ZEUS/H1. Afternoon sessions will be devoted to computational classes. The meeting is sponsored by the IPPP; meals, accommodation and travel within the UK will be provided free of charge. Organizing committee: Ilija Bizjak, Katherine Korcsak-Gorzo, Filimon Gounaris, Andrew Tedder Local Organizing committee: Andy Buckley, Nigel Glover, Keith Hamilton