How do I calculate a confidence interval for the mean of a log-normal data set?

Question

I've heard/seen in several places that you can transform the data set into something that is normal-distributed by taking the logarithm of each sample, calculate the confidence interval for the transformed data, and transform the confidence interval back using the inverse operation (e.g. raise 10 to the power of the lower and upper bounds, respectively, for $\log_{10}$).

However, I'm a bit suspicious of this method, simply because it doesn't work for the mean itself: $10^{\operatorname{mean}(\log_{10}(X))} \ne \operatorname{mean}(X)$

What is the correct way to do this? If it doesn't work for the mean itself, how can it possibly work for the confidence interval for the mean?

Answer 1

There are several ways for calculating confidence intervals for the mean of a lognormal distribution. I am going to present two methods: Bootstrap and Profile likelihood. I will also present a discussion on the Jeffresys prior.

Bootstrap

For the MLE

In this case, the MLE of $(\mu,\sigma)$ for a sample $(x_1,...,x_n)$ are

$$\hat\mu= \dfrac{1}{n}\sum_{j=1}^n\log(x_j);\,\,\,\hat\sigma^2=\dfrac{1}{n}\sum_{j=1}^n(\log(x_j)-\hat\mu)^2.$$

Then, the MLE of the mean is $\hat\delta=\exp(\hat\mu+\hat\sigma^2/2)$. By resampling we can obtain a bootstrap sample of $\hat\delta$ and, using this, we can calculate several bootstrap confidence intervals. The following R codes shows how to obtain these.

rm(list=ls())
library(boot)

set.seed(1)

# Simulated data
data0 = exp(rnorm(100))

# Statistic (MLE)

mle = function(dat){
m = mean(log(dat))
s = mean((log(dat)-m)^2)
return(exp(m+s/2))
}

# Bootstrap
boots.out = boot(data=data0, statistic=function(d, ind){mle(d[ind])}, R = 10000)
plot(density(boots.out$t))

# 4 types of Bootstrap confidence intervals
boot.ci(boots.out, conf = 0.95, type = "all")

For the sample mean

Now, considering the estimator $\tilde{\delta}=\bar{x}$ instead of the MLE. Other type of estimators might be considered as well.

rm(list=ls())
library(boot)

set.seed(1)

# Simulated data
data0 = exp(rnorm(100))

# Statistic (MLE)

samp.mean = function(dat) return(mean(dat))

# Bootstrap
boots.out = boot(data=data0, statistic=function(d, ind){samp.mean(d[ind])}, R = 10000)
plot(density(boots.out$t))

# 4 types of Bootstrap confidence intervals
boot.ci(boots.out, conf = 0.95, type = "all")

Profile likelihood

For the definition of likelihood and profilke likelihood functions, see. Using the invariance property of the likelihood we can reparameterise as follows $(\mu,\sigma)\rightarrow(\delta,\sigma)$, where $\delta=\exp(\mu+\sigma^2/2)$ and then calculate numerically the profile likelihood of $\delta$.

$$R_p(\delta)=\dfrac{\sup_{\sigma}{\mathcal L}(\delta,\sigma)}{\sup_{\delta,\sigma}{\mathcal L}(\delta,\sigma)}.$$

This function takes values in $(0,1]$; an interval of level $0.147$ has an approximate confidence of $95\%$. We are going to use this property for constructing a confidence interval for $\delta$. The following R codes shows how to obtain this interval.

rm(list=ls())

set.seed(1)

# Simulated data
data0 = exp(rnorm(100))

# Log likelihood
ll = function(mu,sigma) return( sum(log(dlnorm(data0,mu,sigma))))

# Profile likelihood
Rp = function(delta){
temp = function(sigma) return( sum(log(dlnorm(data0,log(delta)-0.5*sigma^2,sigma)) ))
max=exp(optimize(temp,c(0.25,1.5),maximum=TRUE)$objective     -ll(mean(log(data0)),sqrt(mean((log(data0)-mean(log(data0)))^2))))
return(max)
}

vec = seq(1.2,2.5,0.001)
rvec = lapply(vec,Rp)
plot(vec,rvec,type="l")

# Profile confidence intervals
tr = function(delta) return(Rp(delta)-0.147)
c(uniroot(tr,c(1.2,1.6))$root,uniroot(tr,c(2,2.3))$root)

$\star$ Bayesian

In this section, an alternative algorithm, based on Metropolis-Hastings sampling and the use of the Jeffreys prior, for calculating a credibility interval for $\delta$ is presented.

Recall that the Jeffreys prior for $(\mu,\sigma)$ in a lognormal model is

$$\pi(\mu,\sigma)\propto \sigma^{-2},$$

and that this prior is invariant under reparameterisations. This prior is improper, but the posterior of the parameters is proper if the sample size $n\geq 2$. The following R code shows how to obtain a 95% credibility interval using this Bayesian model.

rm(list=ls())
library(mcmc)

set.seed(1)

# Simulated data
data0 = exp(rnorm(100))

# Log posterior
lp = function(par){
if(par[2]>0) return( sum(log(dlnorm(data0,par[1],par[2]))) - 2*log(par[2]))
else return(-Inf)
}

# Metropolis-Hastings
NMH = 260000
out = metrop(lp, scale = 0.175, initial = c(0.1,0.8), nbatch = NMH)

#Acceptance rate
out$acc

deltap = exp(  out$batch[,1][seq(10000,NMH,25)] + 0.5*(out$batch[,2][seq(10000,NMH,25)])^2  )

plot(density(deltap))

# 95% credibility interval
c(quantile(deltap,0.025),quantile(deltap,0.975))

Note that they are very similar.

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

You might try the Bayesian approach with Jeffreys' prior. It should yield credibility intervals with a correct frequentist-matching property: the confidence level of the credibility interval is close to its credibility level.

 # required package
 library(bayesm)

 # simulated data
 mu <- 0
 sdv <- 1
 y <- exp(rnorm(1000, mean=mu, sd=sdv))

 # model matrix
 X <- model.matrix(log(y)~1)
 # prior parameters
 Theta0 <- c(0)
 A0 <- 0.0001*diag(1)
 nu0 <- 0 # Jeffreys prior for the normal model; set nu0 to 1 for the lognormal model
 sigam0sq <- 0
 # number of simulations
 n.sims <- 5000

 # run posterior simulations
 Data <- list(y=log(y),X=X)
 Prior <- list(betabar=Theta0, A=A0, nu=nu0, ssq=sigam0sq)
 Mcmc <- list(R=n.sims)
 bayesian.reg <- runireg(Data, Prior, Mcmc)
 mu.sims <- t(bayesian.reg$betadraw) # transpose of bayesian.reg$betadraw
 sigmasq.sims <- bayesian.reg$sigmasqdraw

 # posterior simulations of the mean of y: exp(mu+sigma²/2)
 lmean.sims <- exp(mu.sims+sigmasq.sims/2)

 # credibility interval about lmean:
 quantile(lmean.sims, probs = c(0.025, 0.975))