On the relation between frequentist and Bayesian approaches for the case of Poisson statistics

Abstract

We propose modified frequentist definition for the determination of confidence intervals for the case of Poisson statistics. Namely, we require that 1-\beta' \geq \sum_{n=o}^{n_{obs}+k} P(n|\lambda) \geq \alpha'. We show that this definition is equivalent to the Bayesian method with prior \pi(\lambda) \sim \lambda^{k}. We also propose modified frequentist definition for the case of nonzero background.