More on confidence intervals for partially identified parameters

This paper extends Imbens and Manski's (2004) analysis of confidence intervals for interval identified parameters. For their final result, Imbens and Manski implicitly assume superefficient estimation of a nuisance parameter. This appears to have gone unnoticed before, and it limits the result's applicability. I re-analyze the problem both with assumptions that merely weaken the superefficiency condition and with assumptions that remove it altogether. Imbens and Manski's confidence region is found to be valid under weaker assumptions than theirs, yet superefficiency is required. I also provide a different confidence interval that is valid under superefficiency but can be adapted to the general case, in which case it embeds a specification test for nonemptiness of the identified set. A methodological contribution is to notice that the difficulty of inference comes from a boundary problem regarding a nuisance parameter, clarifying the connection to other work on partial identification.

Balanced Vertices in Trees and a Simpler Algorithm to Compute the Genomic Distance

This paper provides a short and transparent solution for the covering cost of white-grey trees which play a crucial role in the algorithm of Bergeron {\it et al.}\ to compute the rearrangement distance between two multichromosomal genomes in linear time ({\it Theor. Comput. Sci.}, 410:5300-5316, 2009). In the process it introduces a new {\em center} notion for trees, which seems to be interesting on its own.Comment: 6 pages, submitte

Calibration and Alignment of the CMS Silicon Tracking Detector

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will dominate the high energy physics program in the coming decade. The discovery of the standard model Higgs boson and the discovery of super-symmetric particles are within the reach at the energy scale explored by the LHC. However, the high luminosity and the high energy of the colliding protons lead to challenging demands on the detectors. The hostile radiation environment requires irradiation hard detectors, where the innermost subdetectors, consisting of silicon modules, are most affected. This thesis is devoted to the calibration and alignment of the silicon tracking detector. Electron test beam data, taken at DESY, have been used to investigate the performance of detector modules which previously were irradiated with protons up to a dose expected after 10 years of operation. The irradiated sensors turned out to be still better than required. The performance of the inner tracking systems will be dominated by the degree to which the positions of the sensors can be determined. Only a track based alignment procedure can reach the required precision. Such an alignment procedure is a major challenge given that about 50000 geometry constants need to be measured. Making use of the novel minimization program Millepede II an alignment strategy has been developed in which all detector components are aligned simultaneously, as many sources of information as possible are used, and all correlations between the position parameters of the detectors are taken into account. Utilizing simulated data, a proof of concept of the alignment strategy is shown