STAT 463 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Confidence Interval, A274 Road, Independent And Identically Distributed Random Variables
Document Summary
Statistical inference refers generally to the methods by which one makes inferences or generalizations about a population and its parameters based on statistics calculated from sample data. We"ve already talked about point estimation, but recall that a point estimate merely gives us the best guess of the value of the parameter. Along with that estimate, we want to have some understanding of how close we can expect our estimate to be to the true value. We get some of this information from the variance/mse of the estimator, but that"s not the whole picture. Interval estimates give us a range of plausible values for the unknown parameter. As a bonus, interval estimates allow us to state the probability that such an interval will contain the true parameter value, and to adjust the interval to achieve some speci ed probability level. As a result, a measure of the accuracy of the estimate is incorporated automatically into the interval estimate.
