The Science of Life

You'll remember last time , I covered hypothesis testing of proportions and the time before that , hypothesis testing of a sample with a mean and standard deviation.  This time, I'll cover the concept of confidence intervals. Confidence intervals are of the form μ 1-α ∈ (a, b) 1-α , where a and b are two numbers such that a<b, α is the significance level as covered in hypothesis testing, and μ is the actual population mean (not the sample mean). This is a the statement of there being a [(1-α)*100]% probability that the true population mean will be somewhere between a and b.  The obvious question is "How do we find a and b?".  Here, I will describe the process. Step 1. Find the Fundamental Statistics The first thing we need to find the fundamental statistics , the mean, standard deviation, and the sample size.  The sample mean is typically referred to as the point estimate by most statistics text books.  This is because the point estimate of the po...