In order to understand what analternate hypothesis(also called analternative hypothesis) is, you first need to understand what thenull hypothesismeans. The wordhypothesismeansa working statement.In statistics, we’re interested in proving whether a working statement (the null hypothesis) is true or ...
How do I State the Null Hypothesis? You won’t be required to actually perform a real experiment or survey in elementary statistics (or even disprove a fact like “Pluto is a planet”!), so you’ll be given word problems from real-life situations. You’ll need to figure out what your...
Many college students are required to take statistics courses for their majors. Hypothesis testing is often taught as the last part of such a course and in a sense becomes the goal of the course. Statistics instructors receive mixed messages about their students' understanding of hypothesis testing...
You hear about results being statistically significant all of the time. But, what do significance levels, P values, and statistical significance actually represent? Why do we even need to use hypothesis tests in statistics? In this post, I answer all of these questions. I use graphs and conce...
The reason why it’s different is that lying with statistics isn’t necessarily lying. It certainly can be lying, but more often than not, it might just be putting a positive spin on something or interpreting data in such a way that it supports a hypothesis. ...
Hypothesis testing is often taught as the last part of such a course and in a sense becomes the goal of the course. Statistics instructors receive mixed messages about their students' understanding of hypothesis testing. The students in their classes sometimes say or do things that make ...
How to State the Null Hypothesis from a Word Problem You’ll be asked to convert a word problem into ahypothesisstatement in statistics that will include a null hypothesis and analternate hypothesis. Breaking your problem into a few small steps makes these problems much easier to handle. ...
Statistics are drawn from populations, but a “population” doesn’t necessarily mean a physical count of bodies. It can be a collection of just about anything you can count, from galaxies in the sky to a count of trials in an experiment. Thus a statistic can be any quantity calculated fr...
Market and investment analysts use statistics to analyze investment data and make inferences about the market, a specific investment, or an index. Financial analysts can evaluate an entire population in some cases because price data has been recorded for decades. The price of every publicly traded ...
Analysts look to rejectthe null hypothesis because doing so is a strong conclusion. This requires evidence in the form of an observed difference that is too large to be explained solely by chance. Failing to reject the null hypothesis—that the results are explainable by chance alone—is a wea...