Unbiased determination of the proton structure function F_2^p with faithful uncertainty estimation

Abstract

We construct a parametrization of the deep-inelastic structure function of the proton F_2 based on all available experimental information from charged lepton deep-inelastic scattering experiments. The parametrization effectively provides a bias-free determination of the probability measure in the space of structure functions, which retains information on experimental errors and correlations. The result is obtained in the form of a Monte Carlo sample of neural networks trained on an ensemble of replicas of the experimental data. We discuss in detail the techniques required for the construction of bias-free parameterizations of large amounts of structure function data, in view of future applications to the determination of parton distributions based on the same method.

Comments: 19 pages, 8 figures. Corrected treatment of normalization uncertainties. Tables 3-6 and Figures 3-7 updated, eqs 13-14 added