Possibly a Clopper-Pearson interval may help to obtain an intuition about these confidence intervals. (the below is a variation of an answer to https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/311988/how-to-estimate-a-probability-of-an-event-to-occur-based-on-its-count more specifically it is a variation of a graph from [Clopper-Pearson][1] ) The main trick here is that we can switch L and U from being **functions of X** to being **functions of $\mathbb{\theta}$** Imagine the case of 100 Bernoulli trials where the probability of success is $\theta$ and we observe the total number of successes $X$. [![fiducial probability][3]][3] When we observe an $X$ as if it came from the unknown population of Bernoulli trials with true (unknown) probability $\theta$ then we will choose $U(X)$ and $L(X)$ such that no matter what the the real $\theta$ the probability to make a mistake is $\alpha$ in estimating $U(X)$ and L(X). - This occurs when we select for a given $X$ a confidence interval for $\theta$ (based on $L(x)$ and $U(x)$) such that $X$ occurs in a fraction $1-\alpha$ of all the possible cases of $\theta$ in the confidence interval (based on $L(\theta)$ and $U(\theta)$). There is some degree of freedom in shifting more or less weight between $U$ and $L$ and there are many different ways to do this. - If we do this consistently every-time that we perform an experiment, then in a fraction $1-\alpha$ of the cases we will observe an $X$ that let's us include the true $\theta$ inside the interval and in a fraction $\alpha$ of the cases we will not include $\theta$ inside the interval. (this is depicted in the image by the colored lines for the case $\theta=0.2$, the gray lines are cases when we select the right interval, the red when the interval is too high and the green when the interval is too low.) $$-----------------------------------$$ More formally: if we choose a confidence interval such that $$I_{\alpha}(X) = \lbrace \theta: F_X(\alpha/2,\theta) \leq X \leq F_X(1-\alpha/2,\theta) \rbrace$$ then we have a $1-\alpha$ confidence interval. The above means that we choose, for a given observation $x$, those $\theta$ into the interval for which the observation $x$ would occur within a $1-\alpha$ interval $P( L<x<U \vert \theta) = 1-\alpha$, where the $L$ and $U$ are now functions of $\theta$. Then given any real $\theta$ we will observe: - a fraction $1 - \alpha$ of the time an $X$ such that $$F_X(\alpha/2,\theta) \leq X \leq F_X(1-\alpha/2,\theta)$$ - and a fraction $\alpha$ of the time an $X$ such that $$X < F_X(\alpha/2,\theta) \text{ or } X > F_X(1-\alpha/2,\theta)$$ If you like you could write out the $f_{L,U|\theta}$ which relates to $f_{X|\theta}$ and L(X) and U(X) (both L(X) and U(X), functions of X, are indeed correlated). But the figure above already shows enough, e.g. if $\theta=0.20$ then in 0+1+3+12+45+140 cases the $\theta<L(X)$ and in 196+48+8+1+0 cases the $\theta>U(X)$ while in 358+755+1297+1795+1974+1697+1119+551 cases $L(X) \leq \theta \leq U(X)$ $$-----------------------------------$$ If the shape of $x_U=U(\theta)$ and $x_L=L(\theta)$ is convex (like in the figure above), then we can use the inverses of those functions. [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2331986 [3]: https://i.sstatic.net/O4jH7.png