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A computable confidence upper limit from discrete data with good coverage properties

✍ Scribed by Paul Kabaila; Chris J. Lloyd


Book ID
104303241
Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2000
Tongue
English
Weight
214 KB
Volume
47
Category
Article
ISSN
0167-7152

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✦ Synopsis


We present a new and simple method for constructing a 1 -upper conÿdence limit for  in the presence of a nuisance parameter vector , when the data is discrete. Our method is based on computing a P-value P{T 6t} from an estimator T of Â, replacing the nuisance parameter by the proÿle maximum likelihood estimate ˆ (Â) for  known, and equating to . We provide a theoretical result which suggests that, from the point of view of coverage accuracy, this is close to the optimal replacement for the nuisance parameter. We also consider in detail limits for the (i) slope parameter of a simple linear logistic regression, (ii) odds ratio in two-way tables, (iii) ratio of means for two Poisson variables. In all these examples the coverage performance of our upper limit is a dramatic improvement on the coverage performance of the standard approximate upper limits considered.