The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals
Cardiff University · University of Groningen · +4 more institutions
Abstract
Interval estimates - estimates of parameters that include an allowance for sampling uncertainty - have long been touted as a key component of statistical analyses. There are several kinds of interval estimates, but the most popular are confidence intervals (CIs): intervals that contain the true parameter value in some known proportion of repeated samples, on average. The width of confidence intervals is thought to index the precision of an estimate; CIs are thought to be a guide to which parameter values are plausible or reasonable; and the confidence coefficient of the interval (e.g., 95 %) is thought to index the plausibility that the true parameter is included in the interval. We show in a number of…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 60.55
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 113
Authors
5Topics & keywords
- Confidence interval
- Fallacy
- Statistics
- Tolerance interval
- Credible interval
- Allowance (engineering)
- Robust confidence intervals
- Interval (graph theory)
- Peace, Justice and strong institutions