Govindaraju, Kondaswamy

Guardbanding for decisions

Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North

The guardbanding principle is used industry in order to manage the risk of noncompliance to specifications which are often externally imposed. In a risk management perspective, guardbanding is an epistemic solution to aleatory problems. Most statistical inference methods for decision problems do not explicitly incorporate epistemic uncertainties as a matter of guardbanding.

We trialled the guardbanding principle for an industrial problem successfully, and some of the successes achieved will be presented. The principle of guardbanding is also extended to legal metrology applications, and other conformity testing problems where limiting values take precedence over specifications. The talk will be followed by a general discussion on the scope and limitations of guardbanding for general statistical decision problems.