Since its adoption, the ISO/IEC Guide 98-3 (GUM) has sparked a revolution in uncertainty evaluation. It’s led to an increasing recognition of the need to include uncertainty statements in measurement results, which has been accelerated by the use of ISO/IEC 17025 and the like.
Document Center now has the new ISO/TR 13587:2012, “Three statistical approaches for the assessment and interpretation of measurement uncertainty,” available to address these issues. The Technical Report is concerned with three basic statistical approaches for the evaluation and interpretation of measurement uncertainty: the frequentist approach including bootstrap uncertainty intervals, the Bayesian approach, and fiducial inference. The common feature of these approaches is a clearly delineated probabilistic interpretation or justification for the resulting uncertainty intervals.
For each approach, the basic method is described and the fundamental underlying assumptions and the probabilistic interpretation of the resulting uncertainty are discussed. Each of the approaches is illustrated using two examples, including an example from ISO/IEC Guide 98-3 (Uncertainty of measurement — Part 3: Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM:1995)). In addition, this document also includes a discussion of the relationship between the methods proposed in the GUM Supplement 1 and these three statistical approaches.
Defining and understanding the appropriate roles of different statistical quantities in uncertainty evaluation, even for relatively well-understood measurement applications, is a topic of particular interest to both statisticians and metrologists.
ISO/TR 13587 presents some of those approaches to uncertainty evaluation from a statistical point of view and relates them to the methods that are currently being used in metrology or are being developed within the metrology community.
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