Confidence interval for event rate I have a data set where I am counting how many events happen ($N$) over a given duration ($t$), and am defining an event rate as $R=N/t$. What I'm wondering is what $N$ gives me a certain confidence on the rate. Looking on the web I found this formula:
$$
\Delta R = Z\sqrt{\frac{R}{t}},
$$
or
$$
N = (\frac{t\Delta R}{Z})^2
$$
But, if this is the $N$ required to get a certain confidence interval on my rate, this equation means the smaller I want my confidence interval, the smaller $N$ becomes. This seems counter-intuitive, I feel like I have more confidence when $N$ is large.
Eg. if I am counting people walking by, and I count 3 in 60 minutes, that is 1/20 per minute and I don't have much confidence in that number. If, however, I saw 300 people in 60 minutes, then I am more confident that they come by at 5 per minute.
 A: (You didn't explain $Z$, please do so.)  If we assume a Poisson distribution for your count $N_i$ (is is unclear if you have one or more counts) then $N_i \sim \mathcal{Po}(\lambda t_i)$ and the observed rate $R_i=N_i/t_i$ will have expectation $\lambda$, the parameter representing the rate. The standard deviation of $R_i$ will be $\sqrt{\lambda/t_i}$, and that could be used for an approximate confidence interval.  $N$ is the count, an observation, you cannot choose it. If the rate $\lambda$ is large, then since expectation and variance in the Poisson distribution are equal, the standard deviation of the rate estimate becomes larger. What you can choose is the observation interval $t_i$, and by making that larger you can reduce the standard deviation.  
It could be better to use the loglikelihood function and construct a CI directly from it, inverting the likelihood ratio test (This is effectively what is done in the R example below.) 
If you have $n$ independent observations, say counts on different days, you could use Poisson regression, with the (log of) the observation time $t_i$ as an offset. In R code this could look like, using simulated data:
set.seed(7*11*13)
t <- c(1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 8)
lambda <- 3
N <- rpois(length(t), lambda*t)
yourdf <- data.frame(t, N)
mod <- glm(N ~ offset(log(t)), family=poisson, data=yourdf)
mod

Call:  glm(formula = N ~ offset(log(t)), family = poisson, data = yourdf)

Coefficients:
(Intercept)  
      1.159  

Note that $e^{1.159} \approx 3.19$ close to the value used in simulation $\lambda=3$. The we can get a confidence interval on $\lambda$ by 
exp(confint(mod))
Waiting for profiling to be done...
   2.5 %   97.5 % 
2.608252 3.846705 

