No. 2003 Plenary talk

Family name : Knuteson
Given name  : Bruce
Affiliation : Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abbreviation : MIT
E-mail address : knuteson@mit.edu

Title : Systematic Analysis of Frontier Energy Collider Data

Abstract : 
The current generation of frontier energy colliders presents an
excellent opportunity for discovering physics beyond the Standard Model.
Unfortunately, predictions for what that new physics may be are all over
the map.  How can we search for new physics when we only vaguely know
what it should look like?  Is there a way to perform an unbiased yet
data-driven search?  Can we quantify the "interestingness" of apparent
anomalies after looking at the data?  Is it possible to set up a
framework that systematizes and subsumes the current shotgun approach to
model-testing, and enhances our chances of convincingly demonstrating
evidence of new physics in Tevatron or LHC data?  SLEUTH is a strategy
that answers these and related questions.

QUAERO is a web-based tool that automates the final steps of analyses at
frontier energy colliders.  It has been designed with the goals of
expunging exclusion contours from conference talks, obviating the
necessity of "uncorrecting" experimental results, reducing human bias in
experimental measurements, reducing by orders of magnitude the time
required to perform analyses, allowing the publication of collider data
in their full dimensionality, rigorously propagating systematic errors,
dramatically increasing the robustness of experimental results, and
facilitating the combination of results among different experiments.
QUAERO has been used to make a subset of D0 Run I data publicly
available, and is being explored as a means of putting LEP data at your
fingertips.  Key enabling ideas include an efficient heuristic for
variable selection, a fast non-parametric density estimator, a
prescription for optimal binning, an orthogonal partitioning of the
data, and a convenient means of handling systematic errors.