Development of a robust nuclear data adjustment method to outliers

¹ Nagoya University, School of Engineering, Aichi, Japan
² Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Oarai Research and Development Institute, Ibaraki, Japan

^* Corresponding author: y-fukui@fermi.energy.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Published online: 29 March 2023

Abstract

We developed a new nuclear data adjustment method for experimental data containing outliers. This method mitigates the effect of outliers by applying M-estimation, a type of robust estimation, to the conventional nuclear data adjustment method using sensitivity coefficients. Based on the M-estimation, we derived a weighted nuclear data adjustment formula and developed a weight calculation method. The weighted nuclear data adjustment formula was derived by weighting the function to take the extremum of the conventional nuclear data adjustment. The weighting of each nuclear characteristic is calculated from the difference between the measured and calculated values of the nuclear characteristic. This weight calculation method can evaluate the validity of each nuclear characteristic by considering correlations between nuclear characteristics using singular value decomposition. The proposed method and the conventional method were compared and verified by twin experiments. In the twin experiments, the nuclear data were adjusted using experimental data that intentionally included outliers. As a result of twin experiments, it was confirmed that the nuclear data were adjusted robustly and appropriately even with the experimental data containing outliers.