Lecture

Confidence Intervals: Margins, Coverage, Pivots

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In course

EE-209: Elements of statistics for data science

Théorie de l'estimation: estimateurs du maximum de vraisemblance, information de Fisher, inégalité de Cramer-Rao, intervalles de confiance. Tests d'hypothèses: cadre de Neyman-Pearson: test du rapport de vraisemblance, tests paramétriques et non-parmétriq ...

Description

This lecture covers the concepts of margin of error, standard error, nominal and effective coverage, and pivots in the context of confidence intervals. It explains how to construct confidence intervals for scalar parameters, using margins of error to quantify uncertainty and pivots to ensure distribution independence. The application of these concepts is demonstrated through examples involving Bernoulli models and Maximum Likelihood Estimators.

Instructor

Florent Gérard Krzakala

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (31)

Margin of error

The margin of error is a statistic expressing the amount of random sampling error in the results of a survey. The larger the margin of error, the less confidence one should have that a poll result would reflect the result of a census of the entire population. The margin of error will be positive whenever a population is incompletely sampled and the outcome measure has positive variance, which is to say, whenever the measure varies. The term margin of error is often used in non-survey contexts to indicate observational error in reporting measured quantities.

Credible interval

In Bayesian statistics, a credible interval is an interval within which an unobserved parameter value falls with a particular probability. It is an interval in the domain of a posterior probability distribution or a predictive distribution. The generalisation to multivariate problems is the credible region. Credible intervals are analogous to confidence intervals and confidence regions in frequentist statistics, although they differ on a philosophical basis: Bayesian intervals treat their bounds as fixed and the estimated parameter as a random variable, whereas frequentist confidence intervals treat their bounds as random variables and the parameter as a fixed value.

Standard deviation

In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range. Standard deviation may be abbreviated SD, and is most commonly represented in mathematical texts and equations by the lower case Greek letter σ (sigma), for the population standard deviation, or the Latin letter s, for the sample standard deviation.

Prediction interval

In statistical inference, specifically predictive inference, a prediction interval is an estimate of an interval in which a future observation will fall, with a certain probability, given what has already been observed. Prediction intervals are often used in regression analysis.

Confidence distribution

In statistical inference, the concept of a confidence distribution (CD) has often been loosely referred to as a distribution function on the parameter space that can represent confidence intervals of all levels for a parameter of interest. Historically, it has typically been constructed by inverting the upper limits of lower sided confidence intervals of all levels, and it was also commonly associated with a fiducial interpretation (fiducial distribution), although it is a purely frequentist concept.

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