Measurement errors in R

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.