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What's the Score?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

David Birnbaum
David Birnbaum*
Affiliation:
Applied Epidemiology, Sidney, British Columbia, Canada
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Abstract

If you have calculated a confidence interval for an infection rate and found the interval extending into meaningless negative numbers, chances are the error is due to use of approximation formulae. Many of us unknowingly were taught to use the Wald approximation, which does not always approximate the exact binomial distribution accurately. Poor approximation can occur in infection surveillance at both small and large sample sizes.

Type
Statistics for Hospital Epidemiology
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 57 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 2000

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References

1.Birnbaum, D. Who is at risk of what? Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 1999;20:706–707.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
2.Rothman, KJ, Greenland, S. Modern Epidemiology. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven Publishers; 1998.Google Scholar