Confidence interval for a mean or mean difference 1
An internet provider randomly samples its outage reports from last winter. Each report describes one outage, even if a home had several.
Which question could be answered using a one-sample \(t\)-confidence interval from these reports? Explain why the others do not fit.
a) What interval estimates the fraction of the provider's reported outages that lasted longer than one hour?
b) What interval runs from the shortest to the longest sampled outage?
c) What interval estimates the mean length of all outages reported to this provider last winter?
Hints
- Notice whether each question is about a mean or a proportion.
- Decide whether the question concerns only sampled outages or all the provider's reported outages.
- A population-mean confidence interval has a different goal from describing a sample's smallest and largest observations.
Solution
1. Choice c) estimates the population mean length of the provider's reported outages. Each outage report is one observation, not each home.
2. Choice a) asks for a proportion, not a population mean.
3. Choice b) describes the range of observed outages, not an estimate of a population mean.
Answer
c). Choice a) concerns a proportion; b) concerns the observed sample range.
