Question

How much money do winners go home with from the television quiz show Jeopardy? To determine an answer, a random sample of winners was drawn and money won by those winners is listed below. Construct a 95% confidence interval to estimate the mean winnings for all players on Jeopardy.$26,650 $6,060 $52,820 $8,490 $13,660$25,840 $49,840 $23,790 $51,480 $18,960$990 $11,450 $41,810 $21,060 $7,860

Answer 1

Answer:

The 95% confidence interval would be given by (14444.04;33657.30)

Step-by-step explanation:

Previous concepts

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".

Data: $26,650 $6,060 $52,820 $8,490 $13,660$25,840 $49,840 $23,790 $51,480 $18,960$990 $11,450 $41,810 $21,060 $7,860

We can calculate the mean and the deviation from these data with the following formulas:

$\bar X= \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n x_i}{n}$

$s=\sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^n (x_i -\bar X)^2}{n-1}}$

$\bar X=24050.67$ represent the sample mean for the sample  

$\mu$ population mean (variable of interest)

s=17386.13 represent the sample standard deviation

n=15 represent the sample size  

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:

$\bar X \pm t_{\alpha/2}\frac{s}{\sqrt{n}}$   (1)

In order to calculate the critical value $t_{\alpha/2}$ we need to find first the degrees of freedom, given by:

$df=n-1=15-1=14$

Since the Confidence is 0.95 or 95%, the value of $\alpha=0.05$ and $\alpha/2 =0.025$, and we can use excel, a calculator or a tabel to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.025,14)".And we see that $t_{\alpha/2}=2.14$

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

$24050.67-2.14\frac{17386.13}{\sqrt{15}}=14444.04$    

$24050.67+2.14\frac{17386.13}{\sqrt{15}}=33657.30$

So on this case the 95% confidence interval would be given by (14444.04;33657.30)