Dennis Roberts wrote:
>
> it seems to me that the notion of a confidence interval is a general
> concept ... having to do with estimating some unknown quantity in which
> errors are known to occur or be present in that estimation process
>
> in general, the generic version of a CI is:
>
> statistic/estimator +/- (multiplier) * error
Dennis, this is just not so. Even some familiar and widely-used
confidence intervals like the sign interval do not follow this pattern.
I think I understand what you are trying to say; there is a general
concept of interval estimator, and within that a special class which are
obtained by specifying a point estimator for a parameter and some
multiple of its spread. *Some* confidence intervals - the most familiar,
I will agree - are of this type. But not all of these are confidence
intervals and not all CI's are of this type. So please let us not abuse
the word "confidence interval" for things that generally aren't.
-Robert Dawson
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