9: Confidence Intervals
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In this chapter, you will learn to construct and interpret confidence intervals. You will also learn a new distribution, the Student's-t, and how it is used with these intervals. Throughout the chapter, it is important to keep in mind that the confidence interval is a random variable. It is the population parameter that is fixed.
- 9.0: Prelude to Confidence Intervals
- In this chapter, you will learn to construct and interpret confidence intervals. You will also learn a new distribution, the Student's-t, and how it is used with these intervals. Throughout the chapter, it is important to keep in mind that the confidence interval is a random variable. It is the population parameter that is fixed.
- 9.1: A Single Population Mean using the Normal Distribution
- A confidence interval for a population mean with a known standard deviation is based on the fact that the sample means follow an approximately normal distribution.
- 9.2: A Single Population Mean using the Student t-Distribution
- We rarely know the population standard deviation. In the past, when the sample size was large, this did not present a problem to statisticians. They used the sample standard deviation ss as an estimate for σσ and proceeded as before to calculate a confidence interval with close enough results. However, statisticians ran into problems when the sample size was small. A small sample size caused inaccuracies in the confidence interval.
- 9.3: A Population Proportion
- The procedure to find the confidence interval, the sample size, the error bound, and the confidence level for a proportion is similar to that for the population mean, but the formulas are different.
- 9.S: Confidence Intervals (Summary)
- In this module, we learned how to calculate the confidence interval for a single population mean where the population standard deviation is known.