Statistical Sciences 1024A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Null Hypothesis, Test Statistic, Statistical Parameter
14 May 2016
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Objective: to test a claim about population parameter . Procedure: state hypotheses h0 and ha, calculate test statistic, convert test statistic to p-value and interpret, consider significance level (optional) H0: e. g. our class mean age is 50 (h0: =50) Begin with the assumption that the null hypothesis is true. (similar to the notion of innocent until proven guilty: the null hypothesis may or may not be rejected, but our aim is to reject the null hypothesis! Ha: e. g. the average age of our class is different from 50 (h1: 50) Is generally the hypothesis that is believed to be true by the researcher! Steps: state the null hypothesis, state its opposite, the alternative hypothesis. Sometimes it is easier to form the alternative hypothesis first. Example: assume the population mean age is 50 (null hypothesis, the sample mean is 20. The sample mean should be plausible under the sampling distribution of the mean.
