These are pedagogical error analysis notes written for 1st/2nd year physics undergraduate students as a response to feedback from students that there was not sufficient coverage of these ideas in their coursework. The notes contain Basic materials, roughly commensurate with what a typical undergraduate physics major requires (basic concepts, error estimation in measurement and from graphs, and linear error propagation), and Advanced Topics for keen students wishing to learn about probability theory, the two major schools of statistics (Bayesian and frequentist) and Monte Carlo techniques for non-linear error propagation. A list of materials for further reading and a summary 'cheat sheet' are also provided at the end. This open source document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The 'official' version is maintained in a public Git repository at Github. Please feel free to contribute by submitting a pull request!
This document was built using LyX 2.1.1 and tested on Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 14.04. It is built using the dexy template and build system for reproducible document generation. The latest tested version is dexy 1.0.13.
You must also have python installed. The build process has been tested with python versions 2.7.x, though this should not be a strict version requirement. 👀
To run fit_lines.py requires the triangle plotting package. Note that this is pip install triangle_plot not pip install triangle ❗
To set up:
- Install dexy if need be:
pip install dexy(see here for more details on different systems, building from source etc.). - Get the triangle plotting package if need be:
pip install triangle_plot(see here) - Clone the repo somewhere:
git clone https://github.com/mikejbrown/error-analysis.git - cd into it:
cd error-analysis - Set up the dexy build environment:
dexy setup - Run dexy:
dexy - If all went well you should have the fresh build document at
output/error_analysis.pdf!
The files accuracy-vs-precision.nb and uncertain-function.nb requires Wolfram Mathematica or Mathematica
Player. It was tested on Mathematica 9.
©️ 2014 Michael J. Brown This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
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