Data Fluency

Error Analysis and the Determination of Significance

On July 4, 2012, in a joint seminar at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia, preliminary results were announced indicating that a new particle, the Higg’s boson, in the mass region around 125 GeV had been observed at a ‘5 sigma’ significance level. Acknowledging that all measurements, including those performed at the Large Hadron Collider, are subject to some amount of uncertainty, this seminar will examine error analysis, statistical significance, and hypothesis testing. As an introductory seminar, this will provide you with fundamental skills to appropriately analyze and interpret experimental data, and to perform statistical analysis, error propagation analysis, and significance testing to characterize the uncertainty in experimental data.