Goodness of Fit: What Do We Really Want to Know? I
PHYSTAT2003, SLAC, Stanford, California, September 8-11, 2003 Goodness of Fit: What Do We Really Want to Know? I. Narsky California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA Definitions of the goodness-of-fit problem are discussed. A new method for estimation of the goodness of fit using distance to nearest neighbor is described. Performance of several goodness-of-fit methods is studied for time-dependent CP asymmetry measurements of sin(2β). 1. INTRODUCTION of the test is then defined as the probability of ac- cepting the null hypothesis given it is true, and the The goodness-of-fit problem has recently attracted power of the test, 1 − αII , is defined as the probabil- attention from the particle physics community. In ity of rejecting the null hypothesis given the alterna- modern particle experiments, one often performs an tive is true. Above, αI and αII denote Type I and unbinned likelihood fit to data. The experimenter Type II errors, respectively. An ideal hypothesis test then needs to estimate how accurately the fit function is uniformly most powerful (UMP) because it gives approximates the observed distribution. A number of the highest power among all possible tests at the fixed methods have been used to solve this problem in the confidence level. In most realistic problems, it is not past [1], and a number of methods have been recently possible to find a UMP test and one has to consider proposed [2, 3] in the physics literature. various tests with acceptable power functions. For binned data, one typically applies a χ2 statistic There is a long-standing controversy about the con- to estimate the fit quality.
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