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Massimo Ortolano
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The uncertainty specified by a manufacturer is not evaluated by considering a single sensor but by considering the spread across the whole production, determined both from sampling the production and by considering design parameters.

Therefore, you should not interpret the specifications as "95 % of the time the uncertainty is within this range" but "95 % of the manufactured units have an error which is within the specified uncertainty".

Note also that it's not really true that the industry standard for uncertainty is given at a confidence interval of 95 %: it may depend on the specific parameter and on the manufacturer, and in most cases manufacturers don't report information about the statistics across the production. That is, interpreting manufacturer's specification frequently needs some guesswork (and don't assume a normal distribution of the error).

Massimo Ortolano
  • 4.9k
  • 1
  • 20
  • 32