The CMS statistical analysis and combination tool: COMBINE

Understand

This paper describes the COMBINE software package used for statistical analyses by the CMS Collaboration.

• The package, originally designed to perform searches for a Higgs boson and the combined analysis of those searches, has evolved to become the statistical analysis tool presently used in the majority of measurements and searches performed by the CMS Collaboration.
• It is not specific to the CMS experiment, and this paper is intended to serve as a reference for users outside of the CMS Collaboration, providing an outline of the most salient features and capabilities.
• Readers are provided with the possibility to run COMBINE and reproduce examples provided in this paper using a publicly available container image.