English

Confidence Intervals Using Turing's Estimator: Simulations and Applications

Statistics Theory 2025-03-19 v1 Applications Statistics Theory

Abstract

Turing's estimator allows one to estimate the probabilities of outcomes that either do not appear or only rarely appear in a given random sample. We perform a simulation study to understand the finite sample performance of several related confidence intervals (CIs) and introduce an approach for selecting the appropriate CI for a given sample. We give an application to the problem of authorship attribution and apply it to a dataset comprised of tweets from users on X (Twitter). Further, we derive several theoretical results about asymptotic normality and asymptotic Poissonity of Turing's estimator for two important discrete distributions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.14313,
  title  = {Confidence Intervals Using Turing's Estimator: Simulations and Applications},
  author = {Jie Chang and Michael Grabchak and Jialin Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.14313},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:25:21.914Z