Including systematic uncertainties in confidence interval construction for Poisson statistics

Comment on “ Including Systematic Uncertainties in Confidence Interval Construction for Poisson Statistics ”

The incorporation of systematic uncertainties into confidence interval calculations has been addressed recently in a paper by Conrad et al. (Physical Review D 67 (2003) 012002). In their work, systematic uncertainities in detector efficiencies and background flux predictions were incorporated following the hybrid frequentist-Bayesian prescription of Cousins and Highland, but using the likelihoo...

Bayesian credible interval construction for Poisson statistics

The construction of the Bayesian credible (confidence) interval for a Poisson observable including both the signal and background with and without systematic uncertainties is presented. Introducing the conditional probability satisfying the requirement of the background not larger than the observed events to construct the Bayesian credible interval is also discussed. A Fortran routine, BPOCI, h...

Coverage of Confidence Intervals for Poisson Statistics in Presence of Systematic Uncertainties

Abstract In this note we consider coverage of confidence intervals calculated with and without systematic uncertainties. These calculations follow the prescription originally proposed by Cousins & Highland but here extended to account for different shapes, size and types of systematic uncertainties. Also two different ordering schemes are considered: the Feldman & Cousins ordering and its varia...

On Bayesian Treatment of Systematic Uncertainties in Confidence Interval Calculation

In high energy physics, a widely used method to treat systematic uncertainties in confidence interval calculations is based on combining a frequentist construction of confidence belts with a Bayesian treatment of systematic uncertainties. In this note we present a study of the coverage of this method for the standard Likelihood Ratio (aka Feldman & Cousins) construction for a Poisson process wi...

Introduction to statistics--1. The confidence interval.