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

摘要

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.