Hypothesis Testing

In this chapter, we will begin discussing drawing statistical conclusions from data, putting together sampling and experiment design from Chapter 1, Sampling and Generalization and distributions from Chapter 2, Distributions of Data. Our primary use of statistical modeling is to answer questions of interest from data. Hypothesis testing provides a formal framework for answering questions of interest with measures of uncertainty. First, we will cover the goals and structure of hypothesis testing. Then, we will talk about the errors that can occur from hypothesis tests and define the expected error rate. Then, we will walk through the hypothesis test process utilizing the z-test. Finally, we will discuss statistical power analysis.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• The goal of hypothesis testing
• Type I and type II errors
• Basics of the z-test – the z-score, z-statistic, critical values, and p-values
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