Treatment of the background error in the statistical analysis of Poisson processes

Abstract

The formalism that allows to take into account the error sigma_b of the expected mean background b in the statistical analysis of a Poisson process with the frequentistic method is presented. It is shown that the error sigma_b cannot be neglected if it is not much smaller than sqrt(b). The resulting confidence belt is larger that the one for sigma_b=0, leading to larger confidence intervals for the mean mu of signal events.

15 pages including 2 figures, RevTeX. Final version published in Phys. Rev. D 59 (1999) 113009

References in corpus (2)

• Neutrinos in Physics and Astrophysics
• A new ordering principle for the classical statistical analysis of Poisson processes with background

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