Treatment of the background error in the statistical analysis of Poisson processes
High Energy Physics - Experiment
2011-07-19 v2 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ex/9901015,
title = {Treatment of the background error in the statistical analysis of Poisson processes},
author = {C. Giunti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ex/9901015},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
15 pages including 2 figures, RevTeX. Final version published in Phys. Rev. D 59 (1999) 113009