Talk:Binomial proportion confidence interval

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This article may be too technical for a general audience.
Please help improve this article by providing more context and better explanations of technical details to make it more accessible, without removing technical details.

[edit] suggestions for improvement

The article has been labelled too technical, but I don't see it as being that much more technical than a lot of other mathematical articles. One could leave out detail to make things more succinct, but that might make it more difficult to follow. Some suggestions:

  • remove the bit on inverting hypothesis tests, and just mention the normal-derived interval is called a Wald interval, with a link
  • add a section on continuity corrections for the normal interval (and score intervals?)146.232.75.208 15:17, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

27 Nov 2006: I am not a statistician but I believe there may be an important error in the Wilson score interval. According to http://www.ppsw.rug.nl/~boomsma/confbin.pdf, the final term in the numerator under the square root sign should be (z squared)/(4n squared), not (z squared)/4n as is written. I don't have the mathematical capacity to determine which is correct, but for my data the former calculation makes a lot more sense than the latter, so I suspect that wikipedia's entry is wrong. I hope a statistician reviews this at some point!


Actually I think the Wilson score interval was right the first time. The formula in the cited article only looks different because the expression inside the square root was multiplied out. 131.111.8.104 15:34, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


  • There is a comment within the article that does not belong there. Look in the section "wilson score interval" for the sentence "(The following formula may be wrong. It's identical to the way the Normal approximation is derived)". This statement has to be moved to the discussion. Can someone please check if the formula is correct and then remove that comment, please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.212.0.230 (talk) 13:52, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't understand the comment that the Clopper-Pearson intervals are conservative due to the discreteness of the Binomial distribution; they are based on the beta distribution which IS continuous and well behaved in the interval. So, in fact, I think the comment is wrong (Fredrik x nilsson).