A note on computing a confidence interval for the mean

Abstract

A recent article in this journal proposed a new method for computing a confidence interval for the population mean. Extensive simulations indicated that if the association between the population mean and the geometric mean is known, accurate confidence intervals can be computed for a wide range of situations even for a small sample size. This brief note illustrates that if this association is estimated as suggested, the method no longer performs well. Indeed, increasing the sample size can make matters worse in some situations.

Keywords:

• Confidence interval
• Geometric mean
• Bootstrap
• Student’s t

Acknowledgment

The author thanks Prof Curto for his comments.