Limit setting using spacings in the presence of unknown backgrounds
L. Shtembari, Allen Christopher Caldwell · Physical review. D/Physical review. D. · 2023
Finding upper limits on the rate of events from a proposed process in the presence of unknown backgrounds is an often encountered problem in the search for rare processes. Methods based on unusually large ``gaps,'' or spacings, in the event distribution allow to set limits on the rate of the proposed signal distribution. In this paper, we present two novel spacings-based methods: the ``sum of sorted spacings'' and the ``product of complementary spacings'' as tests and compare these to existing tests on synthetic data as well as on a published dataset.