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Hard-coding in confidence interval calculations for single tasks #66

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JemmaLDaniel opened this issue Sep 26, 2024 · 0 comments
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@JemmaLDaniel
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JemmaLDaniel commented Sep 26, 2024

In this line:

  • Sample size (i.e., number of seeds) is hard-coded to ten. This is problematic for any evaluation that is not ten seeds because the resulting confidence intervals will be incorrect; and
  • The critical value for the 95% confidence interval is hard-coded to use the normal distribution (1.96), which is incorrect for small sample sizes like $n=10$. It is generally recommended to use the t-distribution for $n\le30$ and an unknown population standard deviation (which is the case in RL, since we are estimating the standard deviation from our sample). For example, the two-sided 95% critical value for $n=10$ using Student's t-distribution is 2.262, not 1.96. Student's t-distribution will make the confidence intervals more conservative for small sample sizes.
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