A few brief notes on the equivalence of two expressions for statistical significance in point source detections [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05574


The problem of point source detection in Poisson-limited count maps has been addressed by two recent papers [M. Lampton, ApJ 436, 784 (1994); D. E. Alexandreas, et al., Nucl. Instr. Meth. Phys. Res. A 328, 570 (1993)]. Both papers consider the problem of determining whether there are significantly more counts in a source region than would be expected given the number of counts observed in a background region. The arguments in the two papers are quite different (one takes a Bayesian point of view and the other does not), and the suggested formulas for computing p-values appear to be different as well. It is shown here that the expressions provided by the authors of these two articles are in fact equivalent.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Theiler
Fri, 14 Aug 20
-935/70

Comments: 5 pages, no figures; written in 1998, and never published (until now)