When it is appropriate to use confidence intervals?

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Ok, I have always been kind of confused by CI and p values. I understand how it makes sense to use them when we are randomly sampling from a population and want to extrapolate the CI.

What I don’t understand is if we can use it even in other use cases.
Let’s say I want to benchmark an application and measure its runtime. Let’s say I repeat this measurament 10 times and I get a certain mean and standard deviation. So far so good, now I am not sure, can I calculate a CI on this data? Like using the z-value tables I obviously get a result which looks somewhat reasonable (using something like this https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/confidence-interval-calculator.html ), but does it even make sense in this context? And if yes, what does it represent in the context of my program?

In: Mathematics

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re asking a great question but it sound like you are in an area of study where you would be well served by taking another course in statistics. A lot of science that I come across is deeply flawed because the people involved were bad at statistics.

And btw… “When is it appropriate to use confidence intervals” would make for a GREAT XKCD strip!

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