Ed, Ed Pozharski wrote: > IIUC, you are saying that nature of the error should be independent of
my decision to model it or not. Other words, if I can potentially sample some additional random variable in my experiment, it contributes to precision whether I do it or not. When it's not sampled, the precision is simply underestimated. Does that make more sense?
Actually, I was trying to say the opposite - that the decision to include something in the model (or not) could change the nature of the error. Too bad that what I was thinking doesn't apply to the situation you described - my intuition was assuming that there was some time of optimization/refinement/fitting going on. By analogy to profile fitting, modeling a spot as a circle or ellipsoid will have an effect on the standard deviation attributed to that spot. But that wasn't the situation you were describing.
Pete PS - IIUC := ?
