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Abstract

We investigate the issue in determining the significance of candidate
transient gravitational-wave events in a ground-based interferometer network.
Given the presence of non-Gaussian noise artefacts in real data, the noise
background must be estimated empirically from the data itself. However, the
data also potentially contains signals, thus the background estimate may be
overstated due to contributions from signals. It has been proposed to mitigate
possible bias by removing single-detector data samples that pass a
multi-detector consistency test from the background estimates. We conduct a
high-statistics Mock Data Challenge to evaluate the effects of removing such
samples, modelling a range of scenarios with plausible detector noise
distributions and with a range of plausible foreground astrophysical signal
rates. We consider the two different modes: one in which coincident samples are
removed, and one in which all samples are retained and used. Three algorithms
were operated in both modes, show good consistency with each other; however,
discrepancies arise between the results obtained under the "coincidence
removal" and "all samples" modes, for false alarm probabilities below a certain
value. In most scenarios the median of the false alarm probability (FAP)
estimator under the "all samples" mode is consistent with the exact FAP. On the
other hand the "coincidence removal" mode is found to be unbiased for the mean
of the estimated FAP. While the numerical values at which discrepancies become
apparent are specific to the details of our experiment, we believe that the
qualitative differences in the behaviour of the median and mean of the FAP
estimator have more general validity. On the basis of our study we suggest that
the FAP of candidates for the first detection of gravitational waves should be
estimated without removing single-detector samples that form coincidences.