COMPARISON OF 2 MEASUREMENT RESULTS USING THE BAYESIAN THEORY OF MEASUREMENT UNCERTAINTY

The Bayesian statistical theory of measurement uncertainty, recently d eveloped to form a mathematical foundation of international recommenda tions, is applied to the problem of deciding whether or not two measur ement results y1 and y2 of the same measurand conform with one another , taking into account the uncertainties associated with the measuremen t results. Four conformity criteria proposed within the framework of t he theory are discussed and compared with three commonly used criteria based on conventional statistics and the least-squares method. All th e criteria turn out to be essentially equivalent to one another. They all yield the conformity condition \y1 - y2\ less-than-or-equal-to bet as but with different suitable numbers beta in the range from 1 to 3. s is a standard deviation expressing the uncertainty corresponding to the difference y1 - y2.