title: Explorations in statistics: confidence intervals.
abstract: Learning about statistics is a lot like learning about science: the learning is more meaningful if you can actively explore. This third installment of Explorations in Statistics investigates confidence intervals. A confidence interval is a range that we expect, with some level of confidence, to include the true value of a population parameter such as the mean. A confidence interval provides the same statistical information as the P value from a hypothesis test, but it circumvents the drawbacks of that hypothesis test. Even more important, a confidence interval focuses our attention on the scientific importance of some experimental result.
authors.affiliation: National Jewish Health, Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, University of Colorado Denver, USA. EverettD@NJHealth.org
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Curran-Everett
mesh_terms: D016001:Confidence Intervals; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*