Figure 15

Figure 15: Small-number bias of the scale factor estimates derived from a synthetic population of sources where the true number of sources is known. Left panel: An edge-on view of a model Galactic source population. Right panel: The thick line shows NG, the true number of objects in the model Galaxy, plotted against Nobserved, the number detected by a flux-limited survey. The thin solid line shows Nest, the median sum of the scale factors, as a function of Nobs from a large number of Monte Carlo trials. Dashed lines show 25 and 75% percentiles of the N est distribution.