Testing the compatibility of constraints for parameters of a geodetic adjustment model

Geodetic adjustment models are often set up in a way that the model parameters need to fulfil certain constraints. The normalized Lagrange multipliers have been used as a measure of the strength of constraint in such a way that if one of them exceeds in magnitude a certain threshold then the corresponding constraint is likely to be incompatible with the observations and the rest of the constraints. We show that these and similar measures can be deduced as test statistics of a likelihood ratio test of the statistical hypothesis that some constraints are incompatible in the same sense. This has been done before only for special constraints (Teunissen in Optimization and Design of Geodetic Networks, pp. 526–547, 1985). We start from the simplest case, that the full set of constraints is to be tested, and arrive at the advanced case, that each constraint is to be tested individually. Every test is worked out both for a known as well as for an unknown prior variance factor. The corresponding distributions under null and alternative hypotheses are derived. The theory is illustrated by the example of a double levelled line.