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Informally, in frequentist statistics, a confidence interval (CI) is an interval which is expected to typically contain the parameter being estimated. More specifically, given a confidence level (95% and 99% are typical values), a CI is a random interval which contains the parameter being estimated % of the time. [1][2] The confidence level ...
In statistics, the 68–95–99.7 rule, also known as the empirical rule, and sometimes abbreviated 3sr, is a shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within an interval estimate in a normal distribution: approximately 68%, 95%, and 99.7% of the values lie within one, two, and three standard deviations of the mean, respectively.
Each of these confidence intervals covers the corresponding true value f(x) with confidence 0.95. Taken together, these confidence intervals constitute a 95% pointwise confidence band for f(x). In mathematical terms, a pointwise confidence band ^ () with coverage probability 1 − α satisfies the following condition separately for each value of x:
For a confidence level, there is a corresponding confidence interval about the mean , that is, the interval [, +] within which values of should fall with probability . Precise values of z γ {\displaystyle z_{\gamma }} are given by the quantile function of the normal distribution (which the 68–95–99.7 rule approximates).
Calculating the confidence interval. Let's say we have a sample with size 11, sample mean 10, and sample variance 2. For 90% confidence with 10 degrees of freedom, the one-sided t value from the table is 1.372 . Then with confidence interval calculated from
The approximate value of this number is 1.96, meaning that 95% of the area under a normal curve lies within approximately 1.96 standard deviations of the mean. Because of the central limit theorem, this number is used in the construction of approximate 95% confidence intervals. Its ubiquity is due to the arbitrary but common convention of using ...
An example of how is used is to make confidence intervals of the unknown population mean. If the sampling distribution is normally distributed , the sample mean, the standard error, and the quantiles of the normal distribution can be used to calculate confidence intervals for the true population mean.
For instance, if estimating the effect of a drug on blood pressure with a 95% confidence interval that is six units wide, and the known standard deviation of blood pressure in the population is 15, the required sample size would be =, which would be rounded up to 97, since sample sizes must be integers and must meet or exceed the calculated ...