THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING

Data Reduction Techniques

Author(s): Caroline Whitbeck, Ph.D.

You are working on a team of undergraduates headed by a graduate student that is attempting to replicate an experiment obtained by another group the previous spring. Your supervising professor needs your experiment completed in time for an upcoming conference at which the results are to be presented. You rigorously perform the tests and collect the data, which is then subjected to a series of reduction and transformation programs on the computer. The students find that each data reduction process distorts the results to the extent that they no longer match the subtle phenomena that were observed. These were the same phenomena that the group who obtained the earlier results chose to consider negligible.

What do you do and how do you go about it?

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National Academy of Engineering

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