Maximum-Likelihood Approach to Topological Charge Fluctuations in   Lattice Gauge Theory
  We present a novel technique for the determination of the topological susceptibility (related to the variance of the distribution of global topological charge) from lattice gauge theory simulations, based on maximum-likelihood analysis of the Markov-chain Monte Carlo time series. This technique is expected to be particularly useful in situations where relatively few tunneling events are observed. Restriction to a lattice subvolume on which topological charge is not quantized is explored, and may lead to further improvement when the global topology is poorly sampled. We test our proposed method on a set of lattice data, and compare it to traditional methods. 
R.C. Brower, M. Cheng, G.T. Fleming, M.F. Lin, E.T. Neil, J.C. Osborn,   C. Rebbi, E. Rinaldi, D. Schaich, C. Schroeder, G. ...
hep-lat