A binned likelihood for stochastic models [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.04645


Metrics of model goodness-of-fit, model comparison, and model parameter estimation are the main categories of statistical problems in science. Bayesian and frequentist methods that address these questions often rely on a likelihood function, which describes the plausibility of model parameters given observed data. In some complex systems or experimental setups predicting the outcome of a model cannot be done analytically and Monte Carlo techniques are used. In this paper, we present a new analytic likelihood that takes into account Monte Carlo uncertainties, appropriate for use in large or small statistics regimes. Our formulation has better performance than semi-analytic methods, prevents strong claims on biased statements, and results in better coverage properties than available methods.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Argüelles, A. Schneider and T. Yuan
Wed, 16 Jan 19
20/76

Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, code can be found at this https URL