TECHNIQUES FOR UNCERTAINTY ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX MEASUREMENT PROCESSES

This article relates lessons that are useful in the analysis of uncert ainties in a complex measurement process, through a case study. It dis tinguishes between the settings for confidence intervals and those for prediction intervals. It illustrates testing of an assumed variance, shows how to separate the variance contributors in a calibration curve , discusses the use of independence of variance components, gives firs t-order approximations for combining random errors, and emphasizes the necessity of writing all the contributors to uncertainty in a single mathematical expression.