False precision

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "False precision" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Fit approximation
Concepts
Orders of approximation Scale analysis Big O notation Curve fitting False precision Significant figures
Other fundamentals
Approximation Generalization error Taylor polynomial Scientific modelling
v t e

False precision (also called overprecision, fake precision, misplaced precision and spurious precision) occurs when numerical data are presented in a manner that implies better precision than is justified; since precision is a limit to accuracy (in the ISO definition of accuracy), this often leads to overconfidence in the accuracy, named precision bias.^[1]