Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars

Abstract

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Variability is inherent in most biological systems due to differences among members of the population. Two types of variation are commonly observed in studies: differences among samples and the “error” in estimating a population parameter (e.g. mean) from a sample. While these concepts are fundamentally very different, the associated variation is often expressed using similar notation—an interval that represents a range of values with a lower and upper bound. In this article we discuss how common intervals are used (and misused).

Keywords

Statistics techniques

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