Construction of Confidence Intervals

Abstract: Introductory texts on statistics typically only cover the classical "two sigma" confidence interval for the mean value and do not describe methods to obtain confidence intervals for other estimators. The present technical report fills this gap by first defining different methods for the construction of confidence intervals, and then by their application to a binomial proportion, the mean value, and to arbitrary estimators. Beside the frequentist approach, the likelihood ratio and the highest posterior density approach are explained. Two methods to estimate the variance of general maximum likelihood estimators are described (Hessian, Jackknife), and for arbitrary estimators the bootstrap is suggested. For three examples, the different methods are evaluated by means of Monte Carlo simulations with respect to their coverage probability and interval length. R code is given for all methods, and the practitioner obtains a guideline which method should be used in which cases.