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Accuracy vs. Precision

Added Aug 26, 2018 •

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doubt before we look at significant figures in the rules that go along with significant figures we discuss two terms and that is precision and accuracy and I want to give you a tour of a visual model to understand the difference between precision and accuracy is very Pro so for a measurement to be precise and accurate or precise and inaccurate it's possible for a measurement to be not precise but still be accurate or not be precise and not be accurate you can combine the two terms together in any one of the four possible ways and so to compare accuracy versus precision but I like to do is to make four targets an example 1 example 2 example 3 and example for what's a good-looking example I'm going to fire six arrows at the Target and depending on where they land is going to tell me where they were precise where they were accurate for our case the measure of accuracy you remember that you need to have a standard to know you were Acura not the actress is simply this we need to hit the target it does not make a difference how many times we have to Target as long as we hit the target then that would be considered accurate so we have for example we could have six shots that all Hit the Target and are very tightly grouped together this would be considered great precise because of course they're very very close together in the sense this would be all the measurements being very close together so we would say that this is precise and because we hit the target we would say that it's accurate contrast I could also have a very tight grouping off here to the right and because I did not hit the target that would not be considered accurate but it is on the other hand still precise I have a very tight grouping so this is precise but not accurate okay so these are your possibilities for having precise measurements they can be precise and accurate or precise and not accurate. What happens when they're not what would it mean to be not precise well to be not precise would mean that my shots was scattered all over the place so they are not tightly grouped together this would be considered not precise but if you inspect closely you'll see that I did hit the target with one of the arrows so therefore it would still be considered accurate 17 like a little bit of an odd thing you can have measurements that are not very precise but they still represent the real number and similarly I did not get them very closely spaced together because I hit the target one time and that was my measure of accuracy was hitting the tar and I still considered an accurate shot the last example is that they are not stays together very closely and I don't have to Target and in this case we would have not precise shots and we would not have achieved the accuracy that we were looking for and this is a very common example that just seen a lot of textbooks where they show a Target time's the show Duck and they can show him tightly spaced or not tightly spaced hitting the Target or not hitting the Target and these are the measure of whether we have Precision or accuracy so you can see the Precision accuracy are are definitely not the same thing because I can have decision but not accuracy I can have accuracy but not Precision so they're not interchangeable where it's at all

Uploaded by Shane Crone.

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Accuracy vs. Precision

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