Why proper understanding of confidence intervals and statistical significance is important

Dalton, Chris G

doi:10.5694/mja2.51192

Topics

Statistics, epidemiology and research design

To the Editor: In their medical education article on confidence intervals, Hemming and Taljaard1 describe an intuitively appealing but incorrect interpretation of confidence intervals, seeming to use a Bayesian interpretation in a frequentist paradigm.

Bupa ANZ Group, Sydney, NSW

Correspondence: chris.dalton@bupa.com.au

Competing interests:

No relevant disclosures.

1. Hemming K, Taljaard M. Why proper understanding of confidence intervals and statistical significance is important. Med J Aust 2021; 214: 116–118. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2021/214/3/why-proper-understanding-confidence-intervals-and-statistical-significance
2. Bland M. An introduction to medical statistics. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
3. Casella G, Berger RL. Statistical inference. 2nd ed. Pacific Grove CA: Duxbury Press, 2001.
4. Good PI, Hardin JW. Common errors in statistics (and how to avoid them). 4th ed. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 2012.

Online responses are no longer available. Please refer to our instructions for authors page for more information.