Theo1 confidence intervals [frequency stability measurement applications]

Author

Tasset, T.N. ; Howe, D.A. ; Percival, D.B.

Author_Institution

Time & Frequency Div., Nat. Inst. of Stand. & Technol., USA

fYear

2004

fDate

23-27 Aug. 2004

Firstpage

725

Lastpage

728

Abstract

Theoretical variance #1 (Theo1) has been developed at NIST to improve the estimation of long-term frequency stability. Its square-root (Theo1-dev) has two significant improvements over the Allan deviation σ_y(τ) (Adev) in estimating long-term frequency stability, in that: (1) it can evaluate frequency stability at averaging times 50% longer than those of Adev; and (2) it can estimate frequency stability with greater confidence than any other estimator. We discuss a method for determining the exact confidence intervals of Theo1, particularly useful for small sample sizes, using analytic techniques. The confidence intervals of Theo1 are narrower and less skewed (more symmetric) than confidence intervals based on chi-square.

Keywords

frequency measurement; frequency stability; statistical distributions; Theo distribution function; Theo1 symmetric confidence intervals; averaging time; long-term frequency stability estimation; multiple sample statistic; small sample sizes; theoretical variance; Computational modeling; Distribution functions; Equations; Frequency estimation; NIST; Oscillators; Physics computing; Sampling methods; Stability; Statistics;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Frequency Control Symposium and Exposition, 2004. Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International

ISSN

1075-6787

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8414-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FREQ.2004.1418554

Filename

1418554