Astron. Astrophys. 362, 851-864 (2000)

Footnotes

1. The FORTRAN codes of the MIST algorithms are available on request to the authors.

2. This representation of the FP is adopted throughout the paper.

3. The OLS method can be thus regarded, in this respect, as a particular case of the MIST fit, in which the scatter is completely ascribed to the direction of the dependent variable.

4. Notice that the mean errors are often the only significant available estimates.

5. This amounts to a 15% scatter in the direction, i.e. to the mean value of the FP scatter of clusters, see Sect. 4.

6. The pth percentile of a given distribution is the point that exceeds (100-p) ascending order (see e.g. Beers et al. 1990).

7. A percentile interval is given by the difference between the th and the th percentiles (see note 6) of the distribution of interest.

8. I.e. by confidence intervals independent of any assumption on the shape of the probability density of the statistics of interest.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 2000

Online publication: October 30, 2000
helpdesk.link@springer.de