Compute a confidence interval from sample data

Question

I have sample data which I would like to compute a confidence interval for, assuming a normal distribution.

I have found and installed the numpy and scipy packages and have gotten numpy to return a mean and standard deviation (numpy.mean(data) with data being a list). Any advice on getting a sample confidence interval would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

import numpy as np
import scipy.stats

def mean_confidence_interval(data, confidence=0.95):
    a = 1.0 * np.array(data)
    n = len(a)
    m, se = np.mean(a), scipy.stats.sem(a)
    h = se * scipy.stats.t.ppf((1 + confidence) / 2., n-1)
    return m, m-h, m+h

You can calculate like this.