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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:
The demonstration of the t and chi-squared distributions for one-sample problems above is the simplest example where degrees-of-freedom arise. However, similar geometry and vector decompositions underlie much of the theory of linear models , including linear regression and analysis of variance .
Once the t value and degrees of freedom are determined, a p-value can be found using a table of values from Student's t-distribution. If the calculated p -value is below the threshold chosen for statistical significance (usually the 0.10, the 0.05, or 0.01 level), then the null hypothesis is rejected in favor of the alternative hypothesis.
has the Studentized range distribution for n groups and ν degrees of freedom. In applications, the x i are typically the means of samples each of size m, s 2 is the pooled variance, and the degrees of freedom are ν = n(m − 1). The critical value of q is based on three factors: α (the probability of rejecting a true null hypothesis)
In addition, the asymmetry becomes smaller the larger degree of freedom. The right tail will be heavier than the left when μ > 0, and vice versa. However, the usual skewness is not generally a good measure of asymmetry for this distribution, because if the degrees of freedom is not larger than 3, the third moment does not exist at all.
the number of degrees of freedom for each mean ( df = N − k) where N is the total number of observations.) The distribution of q has been tabulated and appears in many textbooks on statistics. In some tables the distribution of q has been tabulated without the factor.
In many scientific fields, the degrees of freedom of a system is the number of parameters of the system that may vary independently. For example, a point in the plane has two degrees of freedom for translation: its two coordinates; a non-infinitesimal object on the plane might have additional degrees of freedoms related to its orientation.
If ¯ and denote the sample mean and standard deviation of the log-transformed data for a sample of size n, a 95% confidence interval for is given by ¯, /, where , denotes the quantile of a t-distribution with degrees of freedom. It may also be of interest to derive a 95% upper confidence bound for the median air lead level.