Poisson goodness-of-fit tests for radiation-induced chromosome aberrations

Asymptotic and exact Poisson goodness-to-fit tests have been reviewed with regard to their applicability in analysing distributional properties of data on chromosome aberrations. It has been demonstrated that for typical cytogenetic samples, i.e. when the average number of aberrations per cell is smaller than one, results of asymptotic tests, especially of the most commonly used u-test, differ greatly from results of corresponding exact tests. While the u-statistic can serve as a qualitative index to indicate a tendency towards under- or over-dispersion, exact tests should be used if the assumption of a Poisson distribution is crucial, e.g. in investigating induction mechanisms. If the main interest is to detect a difference between the mean and the variance of a sample it is furthermore important to realize that a much larger sample size is required to detect underdispersion than it is to detect overdispersion.