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This is the preliminary program for the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Activity Number: 28
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Sunday, July 29, 2007 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Health Policy Statistics
Abstract - #309361
Title: Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for the Mean of a Right-Skewed Distribution
Author(s): Kenny Shum*+ and Scott Zeger
Companies: Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins University
Address: 2100 Lee Highway Apt123, Arlington, VA, 22201,
Keywords: Skewed distribution ; Medical cost ; Bootstrap ; Confidence interval ; Mean estimation
Abstract:

The skewness in the distribution affects both the performance of the sample mean and the coverage of standard confidence intervals in small to medium sample size. Transformation and bootstrap methods have been proposed to improve coverage of the approximate intervals. We compare the finite sample performance of confidence intervals for the mean of a class of right skewed distribution ranging gamma to lognormal. We highlight the improvement with the use of bootstrap calibration. This work is motivated by the estimation of the mean medical cost.

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Revised September, 2007