what is a confidence interval?
The confidence interval is one way of conveying our uncertainty. about a parameter. Itâs misleading (and maybe dangerous) to pretend weâre certain. It is not enough to provide a guess (point estimate) for the. parameter. We also have to say something about how far such an estimator. is likely to be from the true parameter value. With a confidence interval, we report a range of numbers, in. which we hope the true parameter will lie. The interval is. centered at the estimated value, and the width (âmargin of errorâ) is an appropriate multiple of the standard error. We can think of the margin of error as âfuzzâ, introduced to. account for sampling variability.