An evaluation of several data reduction methods for an absolute capacitance measurement experiment

Certain types of electromagnetic interference mitigation techniques require knowledge of the absolute capacitance of a circuit node. A technique has been developed in order to measure this capacitance under operating conditions in the circuit. The procedure is however very sensitive to measurement errors, and does not directly yield good results. In order to combat this, a large number of similar measurements are made with certain parameter variations. This leads to a large amount of data, which must be reduced in order to arrive at the best possible estimate of the absolute capacitance. In this paper several data reduction methods are applied to this type of problem in order to find the most suitable one. Monte Carlo methods are applied to the data reduction methods in order to evaluate their sensitivity to measurement uncertainty