Examples of statistical practice in elementary particle physics for comparison with Mayo's severity concept

Abstract

The field of elementary particle physics (also known as high energy physics) has strong traditions in frequentist inference, heavily influenced by Fisher and by Neyman and Pearson. While I am not aware of direct use and citation of Deborah Mayo's severity concept in the field, one might expect that ideas similar to severity were independently developed. Here, I describe typical practice that addresses the same issues that severity was developed to address, with some tentative comparisons with severity. I invite experts on severity to explain how they would apply severity in these cases and to discuss any differences.

Revised to remove incorrect statements about severity, and to expand discussion of frequentist practice in HEP. 32 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Measurements of the Higgs boson production and decay rates and constraints on its couplings from a combined ATLAS and CMS analysis of the LHC $pp$ collision data at $\sqrt{s}=$ 7 and 8 TeV
• A Measurement of $\sin 2\beta$ from $B\to J/\psi K_S^0$ with the CDF detector
• Lectures on Statistics in Theory: Prelude to Statistics in Practice
• Negatively Biased Relevant Subsets Induced by the Most-Powerful One-Sided Upper Confidence Limits for a Bounded Physical Parameter
• Many perspectives on Deborah Mayo's "Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars"