Robust confidence intervals
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In statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 a robust confidence interval is a robust
Robust statistics
Robust statistics provides an alternative approach to classical statistical methods. The motivation is to produce estimators that are not unduly affected by small departures from model assumptions.- Introduction :...

 modification of confidence interval
Confidence interval
In statistics, a confidence interval is a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter and is used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. It is an observed interval , in principle different from sample to sample, that frequently includes the parameter of interest, if the...

s, meaning that one modifies the non-robust calculations of the confidence interval so that they are not badly affected by outlying or aberrant observations in a data-set.

Example

In the process of weighing 1000 objects, under practical conditions, it is easy to believe that the operator might make a mistake in procedure and so report an incorrect mass (thereby making one type of systematic error
Systematic error
Systematic errors are biases in measurement which lead to the situation where the mean of many separate measurements differs significantly from the actual value of the measured attribute. All measurements are prone to systematic errors, often of several different types...

). Suppose he has 100 objects and he weighed them all, one at a time, and repeated the whole process ten times. Then he can calculate a sample standard deviation
Standard deviation
Standard deviation is a widely used measure of variability or diversity used in statistics and probability theory. It shows how much variation or "dispersion" there is from the average...

 for each object, and look for outlier
Outlier
In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Grubbs defined an outlier as: An outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs....

s. Any object with an unusually large standard deviation probably has an outlier in its data. These can be removed by various non-parametric techniques. If he repeated the process only three times, he would simply take the median
Median
In probability theory and statistics, a median is described as the numerical value separating the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to...

 of the three measurements and use σ to give a confidence interval. The 200 extra weighings served only to detect and correct for operator error and did nothing to improve the confidence interval. With more repetitions, he could use a truncated mean
Truncated mean
A truncated mean or trimmed mean is a statistical measure of central tendency, much like the mean and median. It involves the calculation of the mean after discarding given parts of a probability distribution or sample at the high and low end, and typically discarding an equal amount of both.For...

, discarding say the largest and smallest values and averaging the rest. He could then use a bootstrap
Bootstrapping (statistics)
In statistics, bootstrapping is a computer-based method for assigning measures of accuracy to sample estimates . This technique allows estimation of the sample distribution of almost any statistic using only very simple methods...

 calculation to determine a confidence interval narrower than that calculated from σ, and so obtain some benefit from a large amount of extra work.

These procedures are robust
Robust statistics
Robust statistics provides an alternative approach to classical statistical methods. The motivation is to produce estimators that are not unduly affected by small departures from model assumptions.- Introduction :...

 against procedural errors which are not modeled by the assumption that the balance has a fixed known standard deviation σ. In practical applications where the occasional operator error can occur, or the balance can malfunction, the assumptions behind simple statistical calculations cannot be taken for granted. Before trusting the results of 100 objects weighed just three times each to have confidence intervals calculated from σ, it is necessary to test for and remove a reasonable number of outliers (testing the assumption that the operator is careful and correcting for the fact that he is not perfect), and to test the assumption that the data really have a normal distribution with standard deviation σ.

Computer simulation

The theoretical analysis of such an experiment is complicated, but it is easy to set up a spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

 which draws random numbers from a normal distribution with standard deviation σ to simulate the situation; this can be done in Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

 using =NORMINV(RAND,0,σ)), as discussed in and the same techniques can be used in other spreadsheet programs such as in OpenOffice.org Calc
OpenOffice.org Calc
OpenOffice.org Calc is the spreadsheet component of the OpenOffice.org software package.Calc is similar to Microsoft Excel, with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc is capable of opening and saving most spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format...

 and gnumeric
Gnumeric
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released December 31, 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU GPL license; it is intended to replace proprietary and other spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft...

.

After removing obvious outliers, one could subtract the median from the other two values for each object, and examine the distribution of the 200 resulting numbers. It should be normal with mean near zero and standard deviation a little larger than σ. A simple Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo method
Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used in computer simulations of physical and mathematical systems...

spreadsheet calculation would reveal typical values for the standard deviation (around 105 to 115% of σ). Or, one could subtract the mean of each triplet from the values, and examine the distribution of 300 values. The mean is identically zero, but the standard deviation should be somewhat smaller (around 75 to 85% of σ).
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