11.3 Confidence Intervals for the Difference of Proportions When Sampling from Two Independent Binomial Populations
Let
and
be random samples drawn from two independent binomial populations, where pX and pY are the proportions of successes in the first and second binomial populations, respectively. Additionally, let X and Y be independent random variables representing the observed number of successes in the samples of size nX and nY, respectively.
To determine a 100(1 − α)% confidence interval for the difference in proportions
, let us first discuss the characteristics of the sampling distribution of the difference between two sample proportions. We found in Section 9.1 that the best estimators for pX and pY are the sample proportions or observed relative frequencies of successes
and
, respectively, with

Hence the best estimator for pX − pY is ; and the best estimators for and are, respectively, ...
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