I'd like to discuss another very important topic introduced this week: confidence intervals. A confidence interval is a range of values within which we believe the true parameter of a population can be found. Parameters are characteristics such as the mean, or the variance, or a proportion.

When we're dealing with large populations, we resort to sampling as a mechanism to reduce the amount of time and cost associated with collecting data. As we studied during week #1, a sample is obtained from a population, i.e. a sample is a subset of a population.

If we work with a sample, some information has been lost. That is the reason why we obtain approximations to the population's true parameters by looking at the point estimates calculated with the sample.

Class, suppose we're estimating a population's mean with the help of a sample size N = 20. How would we compute the confidence interval for that mean?

Everybody,

I'd like to discuss another very important topic introduced this week: confidence intervals. A confidence interval is a range of values within which we believe the true parameter of a population can be found. Parameters are characteristics such as the mean, or the variance, or a proportion.

When we're dealing with large populations, we resort to sampling as a mechanism to reduce the amount of time and cost associated with collecting data. As we studied during week #1, a sample is obtained from a population, i.e. a sample is a subset of a population.

If we work with a sample, some information has been lost. That is the reason why we obtain approximations to the population's true parameters by looking at the point estimates calculated with the sample.

Class, suppose we're estimating a population's mean with the help of a sample size N = 20. How would we compute the confidence interval for that mean?