In the process of exploring the Universe for (possible) signals of cosmic sources,
we are in general facing a significant amount of background events.
However, despite the overall background, astrophysical sources may yield
an additional signal rate arriving from specific locations.
This brings us to the essential questions :
* Can we identify a possible source signal by measurements ?
* Can we determine (a limit on) the source strength ?
* What is our degree of belief in the presence of a source ?
In these lectures I will introduce various aspects related to the strength of
(astrophysical) sources, and provide a statistical method to address the above questions.
The analysis method is based on Bayesian statistics, and the underlying algorithms
have been implemented in the NcAstrolab facility of the NCFS-Pack analysis framework.
Lecture Notes :
Registered students, NCFS users and guests with login-id have access
to the full lecture notes.