Hi, My first question is what is your n when you say fixed n. I assume the lambda is the mean of the poisson distribution that you want to take sample from.
Another question is about the sample size. It does not make too much sense to make a sample of size 1. Let's assume that you want to fix the sample size to be 100 and change lambda from 0.1 to 5 with an increment of 0.1. For each lambda, plan to run, say, 1000 times. Then the following will be my approach. Recall that the function cover returns 1 when lambda is in the confidence interval and 0 otherwise. resulting_matrix is created with size 50 x 2 with 0 populated. The matrix is to store lambda and the proportion of samples with lambda inside the confidence interval calculated from samples. With the resulting matrix, one can see that lambdas are in the first column with values of 0.1 to 5 with increment of 0.1. The corresponding proportions are in the second column. All of the proportions are from 0.917 to 0.969 as the last line shows. Hope this helps. > cover <- function(lambda, sample.size, significance.level) { + x <- rpois(sample.size,lambda) + estimate <- mean(x) + lower <- estimate - qnorm(1 - significance.level/2) * sqrt(estimate/sample.size) + upper <- estimate + qnorm(1 - significance.level/2) * sqrt(estimate/sample.size) + if (lambda > lower & lambda < upper){1}else{0} + } > resulting.matrix <- matrix(0, nrow=50,ncol=2) > for (i in 1:50) + { + resulting.matrix[i,1] <- 0.1 * i + resulting.matrix[i,2] <- mean(sapply(1:1000,function(x) cover(0.1*i,100,0.05))) + } > resulting.matrix [,1] [,2] [1,] 0.1 0.917 [2,] 0.2 0.949 [3,] 0.3 0.928 [4,] 0.4 0.939 [5,] 0.5 0.943 [6,] 0.6 0.949 [7,] 0.7 0.942 [8,] 0.8 0.939 [9,] 0.9 0.945 [10,] 1.0 0.943 [11,] 1.1 0.962 [12,] 1.2 0.933 [13,] 1.3 0.947 [14,] 1.4 0.951 [15,] 1.5 0.946 [16,] 1.6 0.939 [17,] 1.7 0.946 [18,] 1.8 0.953 [19,] 1.9 0.964 [20,] 2.0 0.943 [21,] 2.1 0.937 [22,] 2.2 0.944 [23,] 2.3 0.945 [24,] 2.4 0.950 [25,] 2.5 0.954 [26,] 2.6 0.946 [27,] 2.7 0.945 [28,] 2.8 0.949 [29,] 2.9 0.956 [30,] 3.0 0.953 [31,] 3.1 0.941 [32,] 3.2 0.949 [33,] 3.3 0.943 [34,] 3.4 0.956 [35,] 3.5 0.950 [36,] 3.6 0.944 [37,] 3.7 0.952 [38,] 3.8 0.958 [39,] 3.9 0.938 [40,] 4.0 0.944 [41,] 4.1 0.950 [42,] 4.2 0.945 [43,] 4.3 0.948 [44,] 4.4 0.962 [45,] 4.5 0.969 [46,] 4.6 0.956 [47,] 4.7 0.950 [48,] 4.8 0.955 [49,] 4.9 0.946 [50,] 5.0 0.945 > range(resulting.matrix[,2]) [1] 0.917 0.969 -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Coverage-probability-for-a-Poisson-parameter-tp4702535p4702551.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.