How to Use confidence interval in a Sentence

confidence interval

noun
  • The smaller the confidence interval, the more sure that researchers are about a number.
    Adam Rogers, Wired, 13 Nov. 2020
  • The confidence interval for the active cases ranges from 0.1% to 2%.
    cleveland, 1 Oct. 2020
  • This problem could be fixed, perhaps, by adding some kind of a confidence interval to the measure.
    Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 21 Aug. 2017
  • The dark blue shading shows the 95% confidence interval.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 30 Mar. 2021
  • The confidence interval would have to reach down no lower than 30 percent.
    New York Times, 3 Mar. 2021
  • But its confidence interval is plus or minus 16 hours — leaving open a huge window of the planet where the object might land.
    NBC News, 7 May 2021
  • The margin of error was plus or minus 3%, with a 95% confidence interval.
    Emily Dreibelbis, PCMAG, 9 Feb. 2023
  • If the 95-percent confidence interval is between two and eight seconds faster, that’s promising.
    Alex Hutchinson, Outside Online, 22 July 2022
  • The companies said the margin of error was plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, with a confidence interval of 95%.
    From Usa Today Network and Wire Reports, USA TODAY, 30 Sep. 2022
  • Backblaze's blog also highlighted the large confidence intervals in the table caused by the limited drive days for those SSDs.
    Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, 13 Mar. 2023
  • Trump, who analysts and pundits would constantly note had a steady approval rating, had a 95% confidence interval around his approval rating that was three times as large as Biden's has been.
    Harry Enten, CNN, 25 Apr. 2021
  • And that math is supposed to include a statistical range of possibility called a confidence interval.
    Adam Rogers, Wired, 13 Nov. 2020
  • One alternative way of presenting results is to use a confidence interval.
    Alex Hutchinson, Outside Online, 22 July 2022
  • According to Live Science, the team reached its conclusion with a standard deviation of 3.5 sigma, far below the 5 sigma confidence interval that physicists rely on in order to confirm a theory.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 5 Nov. 2019
  • That’s an efficacy, a reduction in relative risk, of about 74.2 percent (with a pretty wide confidence interval, indicating that the statistical power here is only so-so).
    Adam Rogers, Wired, 13 May 2021
  • The model’s output is given as a range, bounded by statistical likelihood parameters – e.g., the 95% confidence interval.
    George Calhoun, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2022
  • Though the vaccine efficacy estimates with potentially wide confidence intervals are not ideal, the doses may offer baseline protection from severe outcomes, which could be critical for higher-risk children.
    Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2023
  • The difference in infertility rates in high-income versus low-income countries is not statistically significant, Mburu said, due to overlapping confidence intervals and data gaps from certain global regions.
    Theresa Gaffney, STAT, 3 Apr. 2023
  • In some cases, the confidence interval ranges from negative infinity to positive infinity: literally any effect size is possible, and the researchers can’t reject the possibility that the program either paid for itself or was actively destructive.
    Dylan Matthews, Vox, 30 July 2019
  • The margin of error is a standard statistical calculation that represents differences between the sample and total population at a confidence interval, or probability, calculated to be 95%.
    oregonlive, 28 Oct. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'confidence interval.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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