Generalized Inequalities to Optimize the Fitting Method for Track Reconstruction

Abstract

A standard criterium in statistics is to define an optimal estimator as the one with the minimum variance. Thus, the optimality is proved with inequality among variances of competing estimators. The demonstrations of inequalities among estimators are essentially based on the Cramer, Rao and Frechet methods. They require special analytical properties of the probability functions, globally indicated as regular models. With an extension of the Cramer–Rao–Frechet inequalities and Gaussian distributions, it was proved the optimality (efficiency) of the heteroscedastic estimators compared to any other linear estimator. However, the Gaussian distributions are a too restrictive selection to cover all the realistic properties of track fitting. Therefore, a well-grounded set of inequalities must overtake the limitations to regular models. Hence, the inequalities for least-squares estimators are generalized to any model of probabilities. The new inequalities confirm the results obtained for the Gaussian distributions and generalize them to any irregular or regular model. Estimators for straight and curved tracks are considered. The second part deals with the shapes of the distributions of simplified heteroscedastic track models, reconstructed with optimal estimators and the standard (non-optimal) estimators. A comparison among the distributions of these different estimators shows the large loss in resolution of the standard least-squares estimators.