What is the difference between point estimate/confidence interval and hypothesis testing?
Hi Darren, Those are really two very different questions…I’ll try to briefly answer both from my perspective. Point estimate/confidence interval is a series of calculations based on collecting sample information. Examples of point estimates are sample means or proportions. A confidence interval is a range within which we would expect the actual population parameter (mean or proportion) to fall at some pre-selected level of confidence, such as 95%. Hypothesis testing involves comparing sample point estimates (means or proportions) to population estimates or other sample point estimates for the purposes of determining the probability the sample data you are “testing” are significantly different from the population estimates or the other sample data. Similar to confidence interval estimates, the analyst selects a certain level of confidence, in the case of hypothesis testing, this would actually be a significance level of .05, as a threshold for making the resulting determination. As fo
