Valid confidence intervals for $\mu , \sigma $ when there is only one observation available

Abstract

Portnoy (2019) considered the problem of constructing an optimal confidence interval for the mean based on a single observation $\, X \sim {\cal{N}}(\mu , \, \sigma^2) \,$. Here we extend this result to obtaining 1-sample confidence intervals for $\, \sigma \,$ and to cases of symmetric unimodal distributions and of distributions with compact support. Finally, we extend the multivariate result in Portnoy (2019) to allow a sample of size $\, m \,$ from a multivariate normal distribution where $m$ may be less than the dimension.