Statistics for Particle Physicists LPC 2021 Recordings - HATS@LPC and LPC Academic Lectures

"Statistics in Particle Physics” is a remote-only class taught by Prof. Harrison Prosper of the Florida State University for the LPC. The class meets over Zoom with CMS students on Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:30 PM (central time), from October 4th, 2021 to December 1st, 2021. The organizers and Prof. Harrison Prosper have generously agreed to have the video recordings and class materials be made public after the lectures. They are posted below.
Those with CMS CERN accounts may register and attend the course at the Indico Agenda.


Video recordings

Note: these links include associated lecture files, homework, and homework solutions - see Additional files


Syllabus

This course introduces statistical concepts and methods to graduate students in particle physics. We assume no familiarity with statistics and develop the most important concepts and methods in detail, but err always on the side of clarity. In order to avoid complications that merely obscure, we shall, for the most part, use simple examples. If, by the end of the course, you have diligently worked through the examples on your own—or in good faith collaboration with your fellow students, you should be able to perform your own statistical calculations essentially from scratch. Of course, we would not expect you to write your own version of Minuit (a program created by CERN scientist Fred James for minimizing functions)! But, we would expect you to be able to replicate results of the standard statistics packages using your own programs, at least for a few of the standard problems in particle physics. If you are able to do this by the end of this course, we shall have succeeded. The only way to master something is to do it yourself. Consequently, homework is a vital component of this course. Your course grade is determined solely by your graded homework.


Prerequisites: College-level algebra, calculus, a modicum of residue theory, and basic programming skills. (If you do not know how to code, learning Python is easy and highly recommended. Also, knowing a bit of the CERN package ROOT would be extremely handy.)


Questions or suggestions can be emailed to the LPC coordinators

Webpage maintained by Marguerite Tonjes.