Meteor stream identification: a new approach - III. The limitations of statistics

The new criterion DN for meteoroid stream identification, based on variables directly linked to observations, is applied to four sets of photographic meteors, three of which have been obtained by independent teams, and the fourth obtained by combining the first three. We find that if one of the data sets has statistical properties significantly different from the others, the use of a statistical criterion to determine thresholds for the stream search does not lead to satisfactory results.