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Most two-sample t-tests are robust to all but large deviations from the assumptions. [22] For exactness, the t-test and Z-test require normality of the sample means, and the t-test additionally requires that the sample variance follows a scaled χ 2 distribution, and that the sample mean and sample variance be statistically independent ...
For the statistic t, with ν degrees of freedom, A(t | ν) is the probability that t would be less than the observed value if the two means were the same (provided that the smaller mean is subtracted from the larger, so that t ≥ 0). It can be easily calculated from the cumulative distribution function F ν (t) of the t distribution:
Likewise, the one-sample t-test statistic, (¯) = (¯) / follows a Student's t distribution with n − 1 degrees of freedom when the hypothesized mean is correct. Again, the degrees-of-freedom arises from the residual vector in the denominator.
Student's t-test assumes that the sample means being compared for two populations are normally distributed, and that the populations have equal variances. Welch's t-test is designed for unequal population variances, but the assumption of normality is maintained. [1] Welch's t-test is an approximate solution to the Behrens–Fisher problem.
The simplest application of this equation is in performing Welch's t-test. An improved equation was derived to reduce underestimating the effective degrees of freedom if the pooled sample variances have small degrees of freedom. Examples are jackknife and imputation-based variance estimates [3].
For example, the test statistic might follow a Student's t distribution with known degrees of freedom, or a normal distribution with known mean and variance. Select a significance level (α), the maximum acceptable false positive rate. Common values are 5% and 1%. Compute from the observations the observed value t obs of the test statistic T.
The table shown on the right can be used in a two-sample t-test to estimate the sample sizes of an experimental group and a control group that are of equal size, that is, the total number of individuals in the trial is twice that of the number given, and the desired significance level is 0.05. [4] The parameters used are:
For each significance level in the confidence interval, the Z-test has a single critical value (for example, 1.96 for 5% two tailed) which makes it more convenient than the Student's t-test whose critical values are defined by the sample size (through the corresponding degrees of freedom). Both the Z-test and Student's t-test have similarities ...