Talk:Statistical hypothesis testing

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I'm adding this rating in the hope it may help attract knowledgeable editors. There is some reasonable material here but it needs substantial editing, both to make it clearer to beginners and to make sure it's technically correct. Perhaps could move the criticisms to another article titled something like "Comparison of statistical paradigms" with a brief summary here? --Qwfp (talk) 17:39, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

1 Issues from 2004
2 Issues from 2006
3 Issues from 2007
4 Issues from 2008
- 4.1 The Definition of Terms Section

[edit] Issues from 2004

Hello. I've reworked the opening to state a definition for "statistical hypothesis test". Hopefully it's an improvement over the previous, which stated only:

Many researchers wish to test a statistical hypothesis with their data.

Feel free to further improve it. -- BTW I see the article has a strong Karl "induction is impossible" Popper bias; I don't think that's necessary, even within the realm of frequentist probability. It would be interesting to trace the history of hypothesis testing as an implementation of scientific method; I don't know what Fisher, Neyman, & Pearson, Wald, etc., said about that. -- I'm aware that a distinction is made between "significance tests" and "hypothesis tests"; I guess that distinction should be clarified in this article. I don't know if separate articles are needed. Happy edits! Wile E. Heresiarch 14:51, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

a tyre manufacturing company`s sales manager claims that all the tyres produced by a company have a tread life of at least 5000 kilometres,64 tyres are sampledfrom a batch of the tyres and the tread life mean of the sample is found to be 8000kilometres.The standard deviation of the production of the tyres is 4000 kilometres.Can you call the company`s sales manager an impostor based on the sample?Assume 5%level of significance and the normal distribution of the tread life of the tyres in a two-tail test?

and do you mean standard deviation of the sample? or of the entire production?

in all practicality, perhaps not an imposter, but the sales manager should certainly warranty replacement of any tyres that do not meet the claimed performance;

In other words, we're not going to do your homework for you. :-)

The following appeared on the page but looks like a comment from User:Ted Dunning

Note: Statistics cannot "find the truth", but it can approximate it. The argument for the maximum likelihood principle illustrates this -- TedDunning

Should this article perhaps be filed under Statistical test or Statistical hypothesis test with Hypothesis testing, Testing statistical hypotheses and Statistical hypothesis testing all #REDIRECTing to it? Oh, and is the "to-do list" box at the top of this page really necessary? If so, maybe it should be explained a little more. It took me a while to understand its significance (no pun intended). In particular, the phrase "Here is" is ambiguous, and even misleading, since it's often used to refer to the links that follow. - dcljr 07:54, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

24-Oct-2007: Since December 2002, it's been the reverse, with all those articles redirecting to "Statistical hypothesis testing" and seems ok. The bigger problem is coordinating articles for parametric and "non-parametric statistics" since the article here has been focusing (for 5 years) on the mean/stdev statistics. -Wikid77 10:54, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Issues from 2006

[edit] Distaste not criticism

"... surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05." (Rosnell and Rosenthal 1989)

"How has the virtually barren technique of hypothesis testing come to assume such importance in the process by which we arrive at our conclusions from our data?" (Loftus 1991)

"Despite the stranglehold that hypothesis testing has on experimental psychology, I find it difficult to imagine a less insightful means of transiting from data to conclusions." (Loftus 1991)

The above are not criticisms of hypothesis testing they are statements expressing one’s distaste for hypothesis testing that offer nothing in the way of argument.

--Ivan 06:39, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unpooled df formula

What's the source for the two-sample unpooled t-test formula? The formula for the degrees-of-freedom shown here is different from the Smith-Satterthwaite procedure, which is conventional, from what little I know. The S-S formula for df is

$df = \frac{\left(\frac{s_1^2}{n_1}+\frac{s_2^2}{n_2}\right)^2} {\frac{\left(\frac{s_1^2}{n_1}\right)^2}{n_1-1} + \frac{\left(\frac{s_2^2}{n_2}\right)^2}{n_2-1}}$

Did someone just try to simplify this and make a few errors along the way?

--Drpritch 19:40, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References?

There are a number of references in the criticism section, e.g., Cohen 1990, but these references are not specified anywhere in the article. Tpellman 04:43, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can we clarify this article to make it more readable?

The article should be made more accessible to lay users by an explanation of some of the symbols (or at least a table of variables) used in the formulas. 69.140.173.15 03:19, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

24-Oct-2007: Good idea. I have added a "Definition of symbols" row to the bottom of the table. Forgetting to define symbols is a common wiki problem. Please flag undefined symbols in other articles, as well. Thanks. -Wikid77 10:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Issues from 2007

[edit] Sufficient statistic

The article states that the statistic used for testing a hypothesis is called a sufficient statistic. This is false. In some cases the test statistic happens to be a sufficient statistic. For most distributions a sufficient statistic does not even exist. This is especially so if there are nuisance parameters. When a test can be based on a sufficient statistic it is advantageous to do so. 203.97.74.172 22:19, 21 January 2007 (UTC)Terry Moore

[edit] What's inappropriate about the link?

Re this edit: "11:42, 14 February 2007 SiobhanHansa (Talk | contribs) m (Revert inappropriate addition of exernal link)" Please tell me what is inappropriate about the addition of the link. It looks like a book, available in full online, about statistics. This could be a useful resource for readers of this article. --Coppertwig 13:47, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for the late response. The link has been spammed across multiple articles and European language Wikipedias by several IP addresses who have not made other edits. Standard practice is to revert mass additions that appear to be promoting a particular point of view or resource. If regular editors of this article think it is a good addition to the article then it should stay. -- Siobhan Hansa 15:02, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] question

Isn't the alternate degrees of freedom for a two sample unpooled t-test equal to min{n₁,n₂}-1? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.57.50.210 (talk) 02:21, 19 March 2007 (UTC).

24-Oct-2007: Agreed. I am putting " - 1". -Wikid77 10:18, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] perm test

what is the application of permutation test in estimation of insurance claims.12:12, 10 May 2007 (UTC)41.204.52.52bas

[edit] Oops.

I "broke" the article by an unclosed comment which effectively deleted the following sections. Sorry.

66.53.214.119 (talk) 00:36, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citations

Many of the remaining requests for citations can be answered by reference to other Wikipedia articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper for the philosophy of science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_proof "A proof is a logical argument, not an empirical one." (so statistics don't prove anything).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance '"A statistically significant difference" simply means there is statistical evidence that there is a difference; it does not mean the difference is necessarily large, important or significant of the word.' (maybe - significant in the common meaning of the word?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size "In inferential statistics, an effect size helps to determine whether a statistically significant difference is a difference of practical concern." "The effects size helps us to know whether the difference observed is a difference that matters."

67.150.7.139 (talk) 03:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Organization

Shouldn't the Contents be the first section?

66.53.213.51 (talk) 04:47, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Issues from 2008

[edit] The Definition of Terms Section

Few of the terms have utility in Fisher's original conception of null hypothesis significance testing. They do have utility in the Neyman-Pearson formulation. Should this article discuss both? Unless so, the section should be heavily edited because the null hypothesis is never accepted in Fisher's formulation which makes the "Region of acceptance" very difficult to understand.

See the fourth paragraph under Pedagogic criticism.

67.150.5.216 (talk) 01:59, 14 January 2008 (UTC)