Workshop on Confidence Limits
27-28 March, 2000
Fermilab 1-West Conference Room


An increasingly common activity in our community is setting limits (Higgs mass, accelerator searches for neutrino oscillations, B_s mixing, SUSY, compositeness, neutrino masses, dark matter ......) There are several competing methods on the market - the CL_s methods used by the LEP Higgs searches; Bayesian; Feldman-Cousins and modifications thereof; etc.

This one-and-a-half day meeting at Fermilab will include:
  1. talks by the proponents of the various methods; some comparison of their relative merits; methods of including uncertainties in background estimates; and

  2. talks by the various experimental groups on the techniques they currently use for extracting limits.

The invited speakers to date include Bob Cousins, Fred James, Louis Lyons, Bill Murray, Harrison Prosper and Byron Roe.

Fred James will give a special series of three lectures on the present status in this field 22-24 March. A black and white copy of his complete talk transparencies is available in PDF (4 MB) and PostScript (5.5 MB) formats.

The dates for the meeting are Monday (all day) and Tuesday morning, March 27th and 28th. If you are interested in attending, please register on this web-site. There is no charge for attending, but if the CERN example is anything to go by, it may be necessary to limit participation because of space constraints.

The workshop is intended for high energy physicists and people in related fields concerned with the problem of setting statistical confidence limits, to help them decide on the approach to use. All participants should have some familiarity with the methods under discussion. A similar Workshop is being held at CERN on January 17th and 18th. There the participants are expected to be already fairly expert on the subject before the meeting - there is an extensive reading list to be studied before the meeting. It is evisaged that the Fermilab meeting will be at a more instructional level.

 Convenor 
  Louis Lyons / Oxford, FNAL (l.lyons@physics.ox.ac.uk)
 
 Local Organization 
 

Harry W.K. Cheung (cheung@fnal.gov)
John Conway (conway@pion.rutgers.edu)
Jim Linnemann (linnemann@fnal.gov)
Cynthia Sazama


Registration

There is no registration fee. However the number of participants is limited so registration is required. Please see the registration page for information.

Proceedings

There will be no proceedings published for this meeting. However a CERN Yellow Report should be available that contains the summaries of all the invited talks and submited papers, as well as the important points brought up during the discussions at the earlier CERN Workshop on Confidence Limits.

Comments to Harry W.K. Cheung - Last modified on Monday, 10-Jan-2000