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    6.01 Statistical Inference

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    edinhojr10
    After having a baby a few weeks ago, the speaker is getting much less sleep, around 5 hours per night compared to the usual 8 hours. This reduction of 3 hours of sleep per night amounts to around 40 days of lost sleep per year if the schedule continues. As a scientist, the speaker is curious about how much sleep other new parents in Amsterdam are losing. He plans to draw a random sample of 60 new parents in the last 6 months and ask them how their sleep has changed. The document then introduces the topic of statistical inference, explaining that from sample data we can estimate population parameters with a point estimate and interval estimate to indicate the precision of the point estimate. It provides the example that if new parents in the sample lost

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    6.01 Statistical Inference

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    edinhojr10
    48 views1 page
    After having a baby a few weeks ago, the speaker is getting much less sleep, around 5 hours per night compared to the usual 8 hours. This reduction of 3 hours of sleep per night amounts to around 40 days of lost sleep per year if the schedule continues. As a scientist, the speaker is curious about how much sleep other new parents in Amsterdam are losing. He plans to draw a random sample of 60 new parents in the last 6 months and ask them how their sleep has changed. The document then introduces the topic of statistical inference, explaining that from sample data we can estimate population parameters with a point estimate and interval estimate to indicate the precision of the point estimate. It provides the example that if new parents in the sample lost

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    After having a baby a few weeks ago, the speaker is getting much less sleep, around 5 hours per night compared to the usual 8 hours. This reduction of 3 hours of sleep per night amounts to around 40 days of lost sleep per year if the schedule continues. As a scientist, the speaker is curious about how much sleep other new parents in Amsterdam are losing. He plans to draw a random sample of 60 new parents in the last 6 months and ask them how their sleep has changed. The document then introduces the topic of statistical inference, explaining that from sample data we can estimate population parameters with a point estimate and interval estimate to indicate the precision of the point estimate. It provides the example that if new parents in the sample lost

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    48 views1 page

    6.01 Statistical Inference

    Uploaded by

    edinhojr10
    After having a baby a few weeks ago, the speaker is getting much less sleep, around 5 hours per night compared to the usual 8 hours. This reduction of 3 hours of sleep per night amounts to around 40 days of lost sleep per year if the schedule continues. As a scientist, the speaker is curious about how much sleep other new parents in Amsterdam are losing. He plans to draw a random sample of 60 new parents in the last 6 months and ask them how their sleep has changed. The document then introduces the topic of statistical inference, explaining that from sample data we can estimate population parameters with a point estimate and interval estimate to indicate the precision of the point estimate. It provides the example that if new parents in the sample lost

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    6 CONFIDENCE INTERVALS

    6.01 Statistical inference

    Sorry, I’m a little confused. The thing is, me and my girlfriend got a baby a couple of weeks ago and I
    don’t sleep that much anymore. Because I’m a little tired, or, a better word might be, exhausted, it
    could be the case that I’m a little less focused than I usually am… Let me before I start be a little
    more concrete about what’s going on. I usually slept about eight hours every night. Now, I only sleep
    about five hours per night. That means a reduction of three hours per night. That’s about 20 hours
    per week and about 1000 hours per year. That’s about 40 days. In other words, if my daughter
    continues with her present sleeping schedule, after a year I will have lost about forty full days of
    sleep!! Just to let you know…

    But, sleep or no sleep, I’m still a scientist. And I was wondering how much sleep other new parents
    in my home city of Amsterdam lost after they had their first baby. Are me and my girlfriend the only
    ones losing so much sleep? Suppose I contacted the local authorities and asked them the contact
    details of all new parents in Amsterdam. Let’s say that new parents are those who got a baby within
    the last six months. I drew a simple random sample of 60 new parents and asked them how much
    hours per night they slept less than before they had a baby.

    In this module I will talk about statistical inference. I will, on the basis of sample information, draw
    conclusions about the entire population from which the sample was drawn. We can distinguish two
    types of statistical inference methods. We can estimate population parameters and we can test
    hypotheses about these parameters. In this module I will talk about the first type of inferential
    statistics. The second type, hypothesis testing, will be discussed in the next module. There are two
    ways in which we can estimate the value of a population parameter. The first one is the so-called
    point estimate. It is a single number that is our best guess for the population parameter. The second
    one is the interval estimate. It is a range of values within which we expect the parameter to fall.

    Let’s assume that the mean number of hours that the 60 respondents in my sample slept less after
    they had their first baby is 2.6. That means that a good point estimate for the mean number of lost
    sleeping-hours in the population is, well, 2.6. In other words, the statistic X-bar (which in our case is
    2.6 hours) is a good point estimate for the parameter Mu. However, one individual point estimate
    doesn’t tell us if this estimate is close to the population parameter we are interested in or not.
    Therefore, next to a point estimate, researchers often also want to know the likely precision of this
    point estimate.

    They show this likely precision by also computing an interval estimate. An interval estimate is a
    range of numbers, which, most likely, contains the actual population value. On the basis of our
    sample mean of 2.6 hours we might predict, for instance, that the mean lost sleeping-hours of all
    new parents in Amsterdam lies somewhere between 2.3 and 2.9. The probability that the interval
    contains the population value is what we call the confidence level. The confidence level always has a
    value close to one. In most cases it’s 0.95. In that case we talk about the 95 percent confidence
    interval. In the next videos we’ll discuss how we can construct such confidence intervals.

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