Construction of Exact Simultaneous Confidence Bands for a Simple Linear Regression Model

A simultaneous confidence band provides a variety of inferences on the unknown components of a regression model. There are several recent papers using confidence bands for various inferential purposes; see for example, Sun "et al." (1999), Spurrier (1999), Al-Saidy "et al." (2003), Liu "et al." (2004), Bhargava & Spurrier (2004), Piegorsch "et al." (2005) and Liu "et al." (2007). Construction of simultaneous confidence bands for a simple linear regression model has a rich history, going back to the work of Working & Hotelling (1929). The purpose of this article is to consolidate the disparate modern literature on simultaneous confidence bands in linear regression, and to provide expressions for the construction of exact 1 - α level simultaneous confidence bands for a simple linear regression model of either one-sided or two-sided form. We center attention on the three most recognized shapes: hyperbolic, two-segment, and three-segment (which is also referred to as a trapezoidal shape and includes a constant-width band as a special case). Some of these expressions have already appeared in the statistics literature, and some are newly derived in this article. The derivations typically involve a standard bivariate t random vector and its polar coordinate transformation. Copyright 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2008 International Statistical Institute.