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A Comment on the Roe-Woodroofe Construction of Poisson Confidence Intervals

Mark Mandelkern·Jonas Schultz
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Abstract

We consider the Roe-Woodroofe construction of confidence intervals for the case of a Poisson distributed variate where the mean is the sum of a known background and an unknown non-negative signal. We point out that the intervals do not have coverage in the usual sense but can be made to have such with a modification that does not affect the believability and other desirable features of this attractive construction. A similar modification can be used to provide coverage to the construction recently proposed by Cousins for the Gaussian-with-boundary problem.

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Mark Mandelkern, Jonas Schultz. 2000-04-21. A Comment on the Roe-Woodroofe Construction of Poisson Confidence Intervals. https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0004052

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