Figure 3

Comparison of 95 % confidence intervals on the target concentration for different estimation procedures. The analysis per replicate shows typical 95% confidence intervals for single samples. Each replicate presents a random sample with expected concentration λ=1.25 target copies per partition and 5% pipette error. Option 1 on the left shows the 95% confidence interval calculated with a single sample method pooling the partitions of the 8 technical replicates before estimating the concentration and its variance with Poisson statistics. Option 2 on the right uses a replicate based method to estimate a 95% confidence interval based on the 8 individual replicates. Both the concentration and its variance were calculated using the empirical mean and variance of the concentration estimates of 8 independent replicates.