Statistical Methods for Investigating the Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum

Abstract

Two separate statistical tests are described and developed in order to test un-binned data sets for adherence to the power-law form. The first test employs the TP-statistic, a function defined to deviate from zero when the sample deviates from the power-law form, regardless of the value of the power index. The second test employs a likelihood ratio test to reject a power-law background in favor of a model signal distribution with a cut-off.