Comment on "Improved probability method for estimating signal in the presence of background" - art. no. 098301

For the statistical analysis of Poisson processes with background, Roe and Woodroofe (RW) have suggested that certain conditional probabilities be inc orporated into the "unified approach" for constructing confidence intervals , previously described by Feldman and Cousins (FC). This Poisson example wa s one of the two prototype problems in the FC paper. The application of the RW method to the other FC prototype problem, that of Gaussian errors with a bounded physical region, makes an undesirable feature of the RW method ap parent.