  Multi-particle correlation techniques are frequently used to study jet shapes
and yields in hadronic and nuclear collisions. To date, a standard assumption
applied in such analyses is that the observed correlations arise from either
jets and associated hard scattering phenomena, or from a background component
due to combinatorial pairs connected only through whole even correlations.
Within this assumption of two essentially independent sources, a fundamental
problem centers around determining the relative contributions of each
component. We discuss the methods commonly used to establish the background
yield in jet correlation analyses, with a full explanation of the absolute
background normalization technique which establishes the background yield
without assumptions about the shape of jet correlations. This is especially
important in relativistic heavy ion collisions where the jet shapes are
significantly distorted from the well separated back-to-back di-jets observed
in proton-proton collisions.
