Comparison between HOD obtained by direct counts in volume limited samples (dotted lines), by the background subtraction method (shaded grey bands), and in the simulated box (solid lines). From bottom to top, we show the results for M_lim = −21.5, −21.0, −20.5, −20.0, −19.0, −18.0, −17.0, and −16.0. The errors are computed using the standard jackknife procedure. As can be seen, these results suggest that our method is in good agreement with direct estimation and supports its robustness. It should be taken into account that the proposed method uses both photometric and spectroscopic catalogues, while direct estimation only uses spectroscopic data.