VIZSTATS 3: WHAT IS STATISTICAL

“CONFIDENCE”

Name:
Tian Zhao
___________________________________
Recall that statistical inference requires us to use a sample to
gain key knowledge about a larger population. Here we’re
going to focus on using the mean calculated from a sample to
construct an interval estimate around an unknown population
mean, m (this is often called the “true”mean).
You’ve probably heard of confidence intervals, and no doubt you’ve felt confident plenty of times in your
everyday life. But in statistics, “confidence” has a very specific meaning. This simulation will let you
explore how confidence intervals work and what a statistician really means when she declares that she’s
“95% confident” about something.

Use VizStats Confidence Intervals on Canvas, or go to: http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~whitlock/Kingfisher/CIMean.htm

I. Feeling 95% Confident
1. Before you begin, take a quick moment to fully appreciate this very unusual situation. In this
simulation, you already know the population mean (and standard deviation), whereas in real life we’re
always trying to estimate the location of the population mean (plus we never know the standard
deviation)!

OK, proceed with the tutorial to get one sample of n=10 from the population distribution of fish lengths.

a) What is the “true”mean fish length in the population?

µ 105 =
.

b) What’s the average fish length for your first sample?

I 177
What’s the standard deviation for this sample?
321
c) What are the upper & lower limits of the 95% confidence interval for this sample?
[94-7,14016]
d) Did your confidence interval capture the true mean or not?
Yes.

2. Make another sample or two:

a) Considering they were all from the same population, why don’t all these samples have identical
means?
Beau se random sampling will generate samples
with different parameters .

b) What’s depicted by the vertical line in the lower right graph?

The
c) What are the orange boxes?
population mean ,
µ .

sample mean .
 d) What are the horizontal lines, and what does their color-coding mean?
95% confident intervals whether true mean lies Tu the intervals
e) If you could take 100 samples, how many of them should have intervals that captured the true mean?
.

or not
95
.

3. Keep sampling -

a) How many samples did you need to take until you got one that didn't capture the true population
mean?
2 .

4. Continue your armchair fish sampling, and keep an eye on the success rate (upper right). Once you
have over 200 samples, answer the questions below:

a) How many samples did you take? 210

b) What percentage successfully captured the true population mean? 93.4%
c) With enough patience to take an infinite # of samples, what do you suppose your success rate would
be?
95%
d) In your own words, try to explain what we mean when we say “I’m 95% confident that my interval
contains the true mean.” with
the interval
many
have the
random
sampling 9r% , of
the-then

population mean .

II. Getting More Confident

How will changing the confidence level change your intervals?

1. Check out some 99% confidence intervals; toggle back & forth a few times to compare them with your
previous 95% ones.

a) What happened to the width of the intervals as you changed “confidence” from 95% to 99%?
wider .

b) Would you feel more or less certain that you’ve captured the true population mean with a 99%
compared to a 95% interval? Explain.
Tntévval Tt should
be
More certain since the
certain TT has the
. is
bigger >

more
population mean -

III. Other Things Change Confidence, Too

1. Follow the directions to increase n, the number of fish contained within each sample.

a) What sample size did you choose? How did your new n affect your 95% confidence
intervals? 20 .
decrease interval .

b) How did changing n affect your statistical confidence?

None .

2. Follow the directions to change s, the population standard deviation.

a) How did changing s change the images of fish in the population?
with smaller s the of fish
differentTmages
,

is less
from eachother .
 b) What happened to the width of your confidence intervals when you decreased s?
decrease
3. Finish up by experimenting with Show Calculations until you feel comfortable identifying each
element in the formula we use to construct a confidence interval.