Editing Confidence interval (section)

== History ==
Methods for calculating confidence intervals for the binomial proportion appeared from the 1920s.<ref>Edwin B. Wilson (1927) Probable Inference, the Law of Succession, and Statistical Inference, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:158, 209-212, https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1927.10502953</ref><ref>C.J. Clopper, E.S. Pearson, The use of confidence or fiducial limits illustrated in the case of the binomial, Biometrika 26(4), 1934, pages 404–413, https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/26.4.404</ref> The main ideas of confidence intervals in general were developed in the early 1930s,<ref name="Neyman1934">Neyman, J. (1934). On the Two Different Aspects of the Representative Method: The Method of Stratified Sampling and the Method of Purposive Selection. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 97(4), 558–625. https://doi.org/10.2307/2342192 (see Note I in the appendix)</ref><ref>J. Neyman (1935), Ann. Math. Statist. 6(3): 111-116 (September, 1935). https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177732585</ref><ref name="Neyman1970">Neyman, J. (1970). A glance at some of my personal experiences in the process of research. In Scientists at Work: Festschrift in honour of Herman Wold. Edited by T. Dalenius, G. Karlsson, S. Malmquist. Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm. https://worldcat.org/en/title/195948</ref> and the first thorough and general account was given by [[Jerzy Neyman]] in 1937.<ref name="Neyman" /> 

Neyman described the development of the ideas as follows (reference numbers have been changed):<ref name="Neyman1970" />

<blockquote>
[My work on confidence intervals] originated about 1930 from a simple question of Waclaw Pytkowski, then my student in Warsaw, engaged in an empirical study in farm economics. The question was: how to characterize non-dogmatically the precision of an estimated regression coefficient? ...

Pytkowski's monograph ... appeared in print in 1932.<ref>Pytkowski, W., The dependence of the income in small farms upon their area, the outlay and the capital invested in cows. (Polish, English summary) Bibliotaka Palawska, 1932.</ref> It so happened that, somewhat earlier, Fisher published his first paper<ref>{{cite journal
| last1=Fisher | first1=R. A. | authorlink1=Ronald Fisher
| date=1930
| title=Inverse Probability
| journal=[[Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society]]
| volume=26
| issue=4
| pages=528–535
| doi=10.1017/S0305004100016297| bibcode=1930PCPS...26..528F }}</ref> concerned with fiducial distributions and fiducial argument. Quite unexpectedly, while the conceptual framework of fiducial argument is entirely different from that of confidence intervals, the specific solutions of several particular problems coincided. Thus, in the first paper in which I presented the theory of confidence intervals, published in 1934,<ref name="Neyman1934" /> I recognized Fisher's priority for the idea that interval estimation is possible without any reference to Bayes' theorem and with the solution being independent from probabilities ''a priori''. At the same time I mildly suggested that Fisher's approach to the problem involved a minor misunderstanding.
</blockquote>

In medical journals, confidence intervals were promoted in the 1970s but only became widely used in the 1980s.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Altman|first=Douglas G.|date=1991|title=Statistics in medical journals: Developments in the 1980s|url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sim.4780101206|journal=Statistics in Medicine|language=en|volume=10|issue=12|pages=1897–1913|doi=10.1002/sim.4780101206|pmid=1805317 |issn=1097-0258}}</ref> By 1988, medical journals were requiring the reporting of confidence intervals.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Gardner|first1=Martin J.|last2=Altman|first2=Douglas G.|date=1988|title=Estimating with confidence|url=https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.296.6631.1210|journal=British Medical Journal|language=en|volume=296|issue=6631|pages=1210–1211|doi=10.1136/bmj.296.6631.1210 |pmid=3133015 |pmc=2545695 }}</ref>