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Measurement Error

  1. Sep 7, 2005 #1

    Watts

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    Could some please distinguish the difference between measurement error and measurement uncertainty. I have actually held conversations at conferences over this issue with statisticians from NIST and no one has ever been able to give me a consistent answer. It seems to be more philosophical than anything. I was just wondering if any body could shed some thoughts on this subject?
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2005
    Watts, Sep 7, 2005
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  3. Sep 7, 2005 #2

    EnumaElish

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    See Uncertainty. My "educated guess" is that uncertainty is minimized when, say, all error terms (in the sense of residual = measured value - true value) are either -1 or +1. But error can further be minimized when all error terms are randomly distributed, say, between -0.01 and +0.01, in which case uncertainty may be greater than in the previous (binary) case because eror terms are "all over" (albeit within a tiny interval).
     
    EnumaElish, Sep 7, 2005
  4. Sep 7, 2005 #3

    balakrishnan_v

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    The former is mean-actual value and the latter is the variance
     
    balakrishnan_v, Sep 7, 2005
  5. Sep 7, 2005 #4

    Watts

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    Thanks

    That helps matters. The statement made in the link ("Because of an unfortunate use of terminology in systems analysis discourse, the word "uncertainty" has both a precise technical meaning and its loose natural meaning of an event or situation that is not certain.") provided still leaves things open for discussion. I will study the information provided and the link information further. On a second note it is basically another way of measuring dispersion.
     
    Watts, Sep 7, 2005
  6. Sep 7, 2005 #5

    EnumaElish

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    You are saying that uncertainty is identical to + standard deviation; is that correct?
     
    EnumaElish, Sep 7, 2005
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