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Thanks beforehand for your answers.

Is this procedure correctly done?

On a fail/pass test I test 100 samples, getting a 95% succes, thus I conclude that the success ratio is 0.95 (which is already an estimation, not the real success ratio of the entire population).

Then, Could I use the binomial to calculate the probability of success for a bigger sampling population using the binomial as B(1000,0.95)? How could I calculate the confidence interval for this calculated probability?

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  • $\begingroup$ In your final confidence interval, do you want to include your uncertainty about the previous 0.95 estimate? Also, a small quibble about terminology: note that a binomial distribution gives you the probability of every possible number of successes in a sample of size N. This then allows you to calculate the expected number of successes, and you could express this number as a fraction or percentage of N. However, this fraction or percentage is not itself a probability. To put it more succinctly: a probability of succes is what goes into a Binomial distribution, not what comes out. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 31, 2017 at 11:23
  • $\begingroup$ Hi Rubens, thanks for the fast reply and thanks for the clarification. Indeed if it possible I would like to include the uncertainty of the previous estimate (best would be to have both, with and without, and compare). In the end I am looking for a way to predict the rate of successes a big population (let's say 100.000 or 1.000.000) will have based on the successes observed in some samples taken from that population. My main concern is to use the right statistic tool and to make the right conclusions. Thanks again. $\endgroup$
    – Pablo M.
    Commented Jan 31, 2017 at 12:14

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Thanks for the clarification. If you want to take the uncertainty about your initial data-based estimate into account, then I think this is what the math looks like. Let $q$ be the true probability of success. You have gathered some data $D$ generated by a Binomial process with this success rate. In this data, you observed $N$ successes. From this, you can work out the following posterior distribution (assuming you have no prior beliefs about $q$): $$ p\left(q\mid D\right)\propto Binomial(N,q) $$ This gives you the probability (up to a constant of Normalization), given your data, that $q$ has a certain value. You can reduce this distribution to a point-estimate $\hat{q}$, for example by taking the value of $q$ with the highest probability under the distribution. Supposing you have no prior assumptions about $q$, this corresponds to the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE), which is given by the rate of successes in your sample (in your case: $\hat{q}_{ML}=0.95$).

If you now want to predict the number of successes $M$ in a new dataset, you could condition on your point estimate $\hat{q}$, and compute the probability $p(M|\hat{q})=Binomial(M,\hat{q})$. However, you indicate that you want to take on board your uncertainty about $q$, which means you want to account for every possible value of $q$, and its probability, when making your prediction of the number of successes $M$ in a new dataset. Your prediction should therefore be based on the following distribution, in which you marginalize over your belief about $q$ given the data: $$ p(M\mid D)=\int{p\left(M\mid q\right)p\left(q\mid D\right)\mathrm{d}q} $$ From this distribution, you can then read off an estimate for $M$ and a confidence interval around that estimate.

The integral over $q$ might be difficult to work out analytically (and note that you'd also have to work out the Normalization constant that I left out in the definition of $p\left(q\mid D\right)$). However, you could approximate it using MCMC sampling methods, or by using the Normal approximation of the Binomial distribution (in this case, the integral boils down to a convolution of Gaussians, for which there are standard results you can use).

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you Ruben, I will try to traduce this into a practicality. $\endgroup$
    – Pablo M.
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 12:35

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