English

Confidence intervals for intentionally biased estimators

Econometrics 2025-02-04 v1 Statistics Theory Methodology Statistics Theory

Abstract

We propose and study three confidence intervals (CIs) centered at an estimator that is intentionally biased to reduce mean squared error. The first CI simply uses an unbiased estimator's standard error; compared to centering at the unbiased estimator, this CI has higher coverage probability for confidence levels above 91.7%, even if the biased and unbiased estimators have equal mean squared error. The second CI trades some of this "excess" coverage for shorter length. The third CI is centered at a convex combination of the two estimators to further reduce length. Practically, these CIs apply broadly and are simple to compute.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.00450,
  title  = {Confidence intervals for intentionally biased estimators},
  author = {David M. Kaplan and Xin Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.00450},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

accepted manuscript (post-peer review, pre-copyedited, author-produced version)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:28:59.545Z