  We report a systematic comparison of the recently measured cumulants of the
net-proton distributions for 0-5\% central Au+Au collisions in the first phase
of the Beam Energy Scan (BES) Program at the Relativistic Heavy Collider
facility to various kinds of possible baseline measures. These baseline
measures correspond to assuming that the proton and anti-proton distributions,
follow Poisson statistics, Binomial statistics, obtained from a transport model
calculation and from a hadron resonance gas model. The higher order cumulant
net-proton data corresponding to the center of mass energies ($\sqrt{s_{NN}}$)
of 19.6 and 27 GeV are observed to deviate from all the baseline measures
studied. The deviations are predominantly due to the difference in shape of the
proton distributions between data and those obtained in the baseline measures.
We also present a detailed study on the relevance of the independent production
approach as a baseline for comparison with the measurements at various beam
energies. Our studies points to the need for a proper comparison of the
experimental measurements to QCD calculations in order to extract the exact
physics process that leads to deviation of the data from the baselines
presented.
