Our method of confidence intervals provides an interval estimate of the population parameter at a certain success rate called the confidence level. When we do not know much about the population, we ca...Our method of confidence intervals provides an interval estimate of the population parameter at a certain success rate called the confidence level. When we do not know much about the population, we can utilize random sampling to build confidence intervals to learn about populations from scratch. At other times, we have claims about a certain population that we hope to test. This quest falls within the realm of inferential statistics and is the subject of this chapter.
In conducting inferential statistics, we are interested in understanding facts about a population without studying the entire population. From our work with sampling distributions, we know that we can...In conducting inferential statistics, we are interested in understanding facts about a population without studying the entire population. From our work with sampling distributions, we know that we cannot expect a sample statistic to equal the population parameter. Instead, we estimate the population parameter by developing an interval estimate, called a confidence interval, based on the sample statistics and the sampling distribution.
