AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 42. Gamma-Rays/Gravitation
Display, Thursday, January 7, 1999, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibits Hall 1

[Previous] | [Session 42] | [Next]


[42.08] A New Statistical Method to Account for Doubly Truncated Data and its Applications to Gamma Ray Bursts

N. M. Lloyd, V. Petrosian (Stanford University Dept. of Physics)

Because all detectors have a limited range of sensitivity, most astronomical data suffers from some form of truncation, such as a lower limit in flux or magnitude. Accounting for this truncation is necessary if one is to draw conclusions from the data through, for example, frequency distributions or correlation studies. In some cases, the data can have both an upper and lower limit, which makes dealing with the truncation more complicated. An example which exhibits this characteristic is the peak of the \nu F\nu spectrum of gamma ray bursts, Ep. We present new non-parametric statistical techniques to account for such doubly truncated data. We show how correcting for this truncation can produce a significant change in the shape of the Ep distribution of gamma ray bursts. We then discuss how to use these methods to perform accurate correlation studies on the data. In particular, we present correlations between Ep with fluence and peak flux, accounting for the upper and lower limit on Ep.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: nicole@urania.stanford.edu

[Previous] | [Session 42] | [Next]