BIOL 1208 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Error Bar, Standard Deviation, Standard Error
30 Nov 2016
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Accuracy the (cid:272)lose(cid:374)ess of a (cid:373)easured or (cid:272)al(cid:272)ulated (cid:448)alue to its (cid:862)true(cid:863) value. A solution with a known concentration of benzoquinone will have a single, exact absorbance. If absorbance reading near value, it is accurate. Precision the closeness of repeated measurements to one another. Not necessarily accurate, but in general a series of precise measurements will also be accurate. The starting point for almost all statistical analyses is to use descriptive statistics which simply describe the population of data points that you have collected. Mean average of a series of data points. Standard deviation describes how far away from the mean the data points spread: aka an indication of how much variation occurs within the data, better representative of actual range of variation. Smaller error bars represent greater precision in the data but not necessarily greater accuracy in the measurements. The comparison of error bar method described previously is a simple visual test.
