# Best statistical model/technique for assessing part data

I'm a software engineer who has been tasked with doing statistical analysis on data collected from a physical test system. The system collects data on a part by setting input conditions, reading in measured data, then changing the input conditions and doing another measurement. A typical data collection file ramps through a couple of dimensions of input data collecting output data for each.

We already have a comparison routine that compares two files to one another. I now need to add the capablity to add two new compare capabilities to the program. Both are batch compare capabilities that would compare a bunch of files. In one case, all files would be compared to a control file with data collected on a known good part. We want to generate some kind of quality measure that would show how close the data sets are to the control data set.

In the other mode, we assume that most of the data files are on good parts, but some are not. We need to do a compare each file to one another and then norm the result into a bell curve.

I did a lot of math in school and even tutored it for 4 years in college. However statistics was never part of my formal education. For some reason my engineering program didn't think engineers needed to know statistics. I have picked up some bits and pieces here and there, but I'm not sure what type of statistical analysis is best for this task.

The data set for a control file (known good part) looks something like this:

Input   Measured Out
.1  .05
.2  .06
.3  .07
etc.


A part that would test good might look something like this

Input   Measured Out
.1  .051
.2  .059
.3  .072
etc.


But a bad part might look like

Input   Measured Out
.1  .08
.2  .09
.3  .10
etc.


I need some measure that would indicate the good part compared to the control has some sort of measure of high quality, and the bad part is of low quality. Most of what I've found applies to psychological data and most of what I've learned about statistics is related to psychology (I have a bit of interest in the subject and my SO is a Psychologist who barely passed statistics in college). The nature of this sort of data is somewhat different from a psychological data set though. The data have dependencies that psychological data don't have for one thing.

Can someone point me to the best statistical technique for this problem?