Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Education
Confidence Intervals Of Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Rates, Frank Wang
Confidence Intervals Of Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Rates, Frank Wang
Numeracy
This tutorial uses publicly available data from drug makers and the Food and Drug Administration to guide learners to estimate the confidence intervals of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy rates with a Bayesian framework. Under the classical approach, there is no probability associated with a parameter, and the meaning of confidence intervals can be misconstrued by inexperienced students. With Bayesian statistics, one can find the posterior probability distribution of an unknown parameter, and state the probability of vaccine efficacy rate, which makes the communication of uncertainty more flexible. We use a hypothetical example and a real baseball example to guide readers to …
Using Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Data To Teach One-Sample Hypothesis Testing, Frank Wang
Using Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Data To Teach One-Sample Hypothesis Testing, Frank Wang
Numeracy
In late November 2020, there was a flurry of media coverage of two companies’ claims of 95% efficacy rates of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines, but information about the confidence interval was not reported. This paper presents a way of teaching the concept of hypothesis testing and the construction of confidence intervals using numbers announced by the drug makers Pfizer and Moderna publicized by the media. Instead of a two-sample test or more complicated statistical models, we use the elementary one-proportion z-test to analyze the data. The method is designed to be accessible for students who have only taken a …