page_title: Confidence interval
section_title: Conceptual basis
hierarchical_section_title: Confidence interval / Conceptual basis
caption_attribution_description: The scientific diagram with the computed confidence intervals.
context_page_description: In statistics, a confidence interval is a type of estimate computed from the statistics of the observed data. This proposes a range of plausible values for an unknown parameter. The interval has an associated confidence level that the true parameter is in the proposed range. Given observations and a confidence level, a valid confidence interval has a probability of containing the true underlying parameter. The level of confidence can be chosen by the investigator. In general terms, a confidence interval for an unknown parameter is based on sampling the distribution of a corresponding estimator.
  More strictly speaking, the confidence level represents the frequency of possible confidence intervals that contain the true value of the unknown population parameter. In other words, if confidence intervals are constructed using a given confidence level from an infinite number of independent sample statistics, the proportion of those intervals that contain the true value of the parameter will be equal to the confidence level.
caption: In this bar chart, the top ends of the brown bars indicate observed means and the red line segments ("error bars") represent the confidence intervals around them. Although the error bars are shown as symmetric around the means, that is not always the case. It is also important to note that in most graphs, the error bars do not represent confidence intervals (e.g., they often represent standard errors or standard deviations)
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