Understanding Confidence Intervals

Let’s start this section with an analogy involving fishing, and assume we’re trying to catch a fish. On one hand, we can use a spear, while on the other, we can use a net. Using the net will probably allow us to catch more fish!

Now think back to our pennies exercise where we were trying to estimate the true population mean year $\mu$ of all US pennies. Think of the value of $\mu$ as a fish.

On one hand, we can use the appropriate point estimate/sample statistic to estimate $\mu$, which we saw in the ...