A comparison of performance statistics for proficiency testing programmes

Recently, ISO issued a new document on statistical methods for use in proficiency-testing schemes. The document presented a number of new performance statistics that involve the use of measurement uncertainties of the participants’ results and/or the assigned values for the performance evaluation. Making use of the Monte Carlo simulation technique, this paper attempts to compare selected performance statistics of different approaches. In addition, the simulation programme was extended to study the effect of multi-modality in participants’ results on the performance evaluation when different performance statistics were applied.