Measurement Errors in R

TL;DR

This paper introduces an R package called 'errors' that simplifies handling, propagating, and reporting measurement uncertainties, making data analysis more transparent and less error-prone.

Contribution

The paper presents the 'errors' package, a novel R tool for easy, automated, and transparent management of measurement errors in data analysis.

Findings

The 'errors' package enables automated propagation of measurement uncertainties.

It provides a simple class for associating uncertainty metadata.

The package improves transparency and reduces errors in measurement data handling.

Abstract

This paper presents an R package to handle and represent measurements with errors in a very simple way. We briefly introduce the main concepts of metrology and propagation of uncertainty, and discuss related R packages. Building upon this, we introduce the 'errors' package, which provides a class for associating uncertainty metadata, automated propagation and reporting. Working with 'errors' enables transparent, lightweight, less error-prone handling and convenient representation of measurements with errors. Finally, we discuss the advantages, limitations and future work of computing with errors.