The majority of clusters in the Universe have masses well below 10 ^ { 5 } \mathrm { ~ { } M } _ { \odot } .
Hence their integrated fluxes and colors can be affected by the presence or absence of a few bright stars introduced by stochastic sampling of the stellar mass function .
Specific methods are being developed to extend the analysis of cluster energy distributions into the low-mass regime .
In this paper , we apply such a method to real observations of star clusters , in the nearby spiral galaxy M 83 .
We reassess the ages and masses of a sample of 1242 clusters for which UBVIH \alpha fluxes were obtained from observations with the WFC3 instrument on board of the Hubble Space Telescope .
Synthetic clusters with known properties are used to characterize the limitations of the method ( valid range and resolution in age and mass , method artifacts ) .
The ensemble of color predictions of the discrete cluster models are in good agreement with the distribution of observed colors .
We emphasize the important role of the H \alpha data in the assessment of the fraction of young objects , particularly in breaking the age-extinction degeneracy that hampers an analysis based on UBVI data only .
We find the mass distribution of the cluster sample to follow a power-law of index -2.1 \pm 0.2 , and the distribution of ages a power-law of index -1.0 \pm 0.2 for \log ( M / \mathrm { ~ { } M } _ { \odot } ) > 3.5 and ages between 10 ^ { 7 } and 10 ^ { 9 } \mathrm { ~ { } yr } .
An extension of our main method , that makes full use of the probability distributions of age and mass obtained for the individual clusters of the sample , is explored .
It produces similar power-law slopes and will deserve further investigation .
Although the properties derived for individual clusters significantly differ from those obtained with traditional , non-stochastic models in about 30 % of the objects , the first order aspect of the age and mass distributions are similar to those obtained previously for this M 83 sample in the range of overlap of the studies .
We extend the power-law description to lower masses with better mass and age resolution and without most of the artifacts produced by the classical method .