Kj. Coakley et al., UNCERTAINTY INTERVALS FOR POLARIZED BEAM SCATTERING ASYMMETRY STATISTICS, Review of scientific instruments, 64(7), 1993, pp. 1888-1894
In many scattering experiments, the quantity of most direct physical i
nterest is a measure of the difference between two closely related sca
ttering signals, each generated by a Poisson scattering process. This
difference is often expressed in terms of an asymmetry statistic, that
is, the difference normalized to the sum of the two signals, correcte
d for an additive background contribution. Typically, a propagation of
errors approach is used to compute confidence intervals for asymmetry
. However, these confidence intervals are not reliable in general. In
this work, generally accurate confidence intervals for asymmetry are o
btained using a parametric bootstrap approach. Based on the observed d
ata, data are simulated using a Monte Carlo resampling scheme. The res
ampled data sets satisfy a constraint that ensures that background-cor
rected count rates are not negative.