Confidence intervals
While point estimates are okay, estimates of a population parameter and sampling distributions are even better. There are the following two main issues with these approaches:
- Single point estimates are very prone to error (due to sampling bias among other things)
- Taking multiple samples of a certain size for sampling distributions might not be feasible, and may sometimes be even more infeasible than actually finding the population parameter
For these reasons and more, we may turn to a concept known as the confidence interval to find statistics.
A confidence interval is a range of values based on a point estimate that contains the true population parameter at some confidence level.
Confidence is an important concept in advanced statistics. Its meaning is sometimes misconstrued. Informally, a confidence level does not represent a probability of being correct; instead, it represents the frequency at which the obtained answer will be accurate...
