Confidence intervals: am I unconsciously Bayesian?

摘要

To most biologists, the exact meaning of confidence intervals is very difficult to grasp, though such intervals are shown in many of our papers as measures of data variability. One of the reasons lies in the fact that the traditional way of teaching confidence intervals suggests much more than they actually deliver. Therefore, working with biologists, statistics teachers need a convincing way of introducing this topic and, to my experience, Monte Carlo simulation offers some opportunities. However, understanding the crude meaning of frequentist confidence intervals may be disappointing for biologists, who might be seduced by the intuitive appeal of Bayesian credible intervals.