HistFitter - A flexible framework for statistical data analysis

We present a software framework for statistical data analysis, called HistFitter, that has extensively been used in the ATLAS Collaboration to analyze data of proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Most notably, HistFitter has become a de-facto standard in searches for supersymmetric particles since 2012, with some usage for Exotic and Higgs boson physics. HistFitter coherently combines several statistics tools in a programmable and flexible framework that is capable of bookkeeping hundreds of data models under study using thousands of generated input histograms. The key innovations of HistFitter are to weave the concepts of control, validation and signal regions into its very fabric, and to treat them with rigorous statistical methods, while providing multiple tools to visualize and interpret the results through a simple configuration interface.