Comparisons of Measurement Results as Constraints on Accuracies of Measuring Instruments: When Can We Determine the Accuracies from These Constraints?

Authors

Christian Servin, El Paso Community CollegeFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

6-2015

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-15-56

Published in Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Constraints Programming and Decision Making CoProd'2015, El Paso, Texas, November 6, 2015; detailed version will appear in Martine Ceberio and Vladik Kreinovich (eds.), Constraint Programming and Decision Making: Theory and Applications, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Abstract

For a measuring instrument, a usual way to find the probability distribution of its measurement errors is to compare its results with the results of measuring the same quantity with a much more accurate instrument. But what if we are interested in estimating the measurement accuracy of a state-of-the-art measuring instrument, for which no more accurate instrument is possible? In this paper, we show that while in general, such estimation is not possible; however, can uniquely determine the corresponding probability distributions if we have several state-of-the-art measuring instruments, and for one of them, the corresponding probability distribution is symmetric.