Errors and Variability of Observations

Abstract

The experimenter is confronted nearly every day with the examination of results from his or her own experiments as well as those of others. There is a need to know the methods by which the data were obtained and what confidence can be placed in the numerical results. This chapter describes the basic ideas of statistics that are relevant to errors of observations and numbers derived from these observations. The authors have defined bias as the deviation of the statistical true value from the scientific true value, and precision has been defined as a measure of variability of an observation around the statistical true value. Bias and precision have intrinsically different roles. One can note, for instance, that precision can be increased merely by making more repetitions, since the precision of the mean of n independent measurements is equal to the precision of a single observation multiplied by n, with almost any reasonable definition.

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