Re:LHC physicists embrace brute-force approach to particle hunt
by brianberns on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @03:25PM
(#17761048)
The article never clearly describes the brute-force approach. Is it just a matter of looking for statistical outliers along all the different dimensions they can think of? How would they then distinguish the "interesting" outliers from random flukes?
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Re:LHC physicists embrace brute-force approach to particle hunt
by Blackbeard_ on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @03:40PM
(#17761173)
The gist is that you would roughly look for deviations from theory on one (probably small) dataset, you'd identify any regions of interest and then run a proper analysis of that region on a different dataset to see if the effect is real.
Re:LHC physicists embrace brute-force approach to particle hunt
by smueller1234 on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @04:34AM
(#17764516)
Caveat: Been a while since I studied this stuff.
The problem with this approach that I see is that it's much more likely to pick up lingering detector issues than the regular test-a-theory. (The difference between looking for a specific thing in a specific place vs picking up anything unexpected.) I wouldn't worry do much about purely statistical artifacts because those can often be worked out with prescriptions and remeasuring. The systematic but not-understood biases are the ones that should plague this approach since in the extreme they would need an independent experiment. I wonder whether CMS and Atlas are sufficient for that.