Tolerance Interval
A tolerance interval is a statistical range that, with a specified confidence level, contains at least a specified proportion of a population's values. It is used in quality control, engineering, and manufacturing to set limits that ensure product or process performance meets requirements. Unlike confidence intervals that estimate population parameters, tolerance intervals directly bound future observations.
Developers should learn tolerance intervals when working in data-intensive fields like machine learning, quality assurance, or industrial applications to assess process capability and set realistic specifications. For example, in software testing, tolerance intervals can define acceptable performance ranges for response times, or in manufacturing software, they help monitor production quality by ensuring a certain percentage of outputs fall within defined limits.