Practical Statistics for Particle Physics

This is the write-up of a set of lectures given at the Asia Europe Pacific Schoolof High Energy Physics in Quy Nhon, Vietnam in September 2018, to an au-dience of PhD students in all branches of particle physics. They cover thedifferent meanings of ‘probability’, particularly frequentist and Bayesian, thebinomial, the Poisson and the Gaussian distributions, hypothesis testing, es-timation, errors (including asymmetric and systematic errors) and goodnessof fit. Several different methods used in setting upper limits are explained,followed by a discussion on why 5 sigma are conventionally required for a‘discovery’