François Fressin led a study of false positives in Kepler space telescope transit candidates. A background or physically associated eclipsing binary can mimic the dimming attributed to an exoplanet transit, so counting candidates alone does not determine exoplanet occurrence rates.
The 2013 study simulated these contaminating systems and compared their predicted distribution with the observed candidates. It estimated how the contamination depends on stellar type, apparent planetary size and orbital period. This makes false-positive modeling part of the population inference, alongside the probability that a genuine planet would be detected.[ref]
The false positive rate of Kepler and the occurrence of planets by François Fressin and others. Abstract: simulated eclipsing-system contaminants, candidate vetting and inferred false-positive rates
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