Students t Distribution

Also called Students t test or t statistic or t test

Biostatistics September 2, 2013

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History

William Gosset
lived from 1876 to 1937 The t-statistic was introduced in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, a chemist working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland("Student" was his pen name). Gosset had been hired due to Claude Guinness's policy of recruiting the best graduates fromOxford and Cambridge to apply biochemistry and statistics to Guinness's industrial processes. Gosset devised the t-test as a cheap way to monitor the quality of stout. Company policy at Guinness forbade its chemists from publishing their findings, so Gosset published his mathematical work under the pseudonym "Student".

BERENA

Introduction

Student's t-test when you have one nominal variable and one measurement variable, and you want to compare the mean values of the measurement variable.

Stated simply,

Student's t-test is used to compare the means of two samples.

BERENA

Independent samples The independent samples t-test is used when two separate sets of independent and identically distributed samples are obtained, one from each of the two populations being compared. For example, suppose we are evaluating the effect of a medical treatment, and we enroll 100 subjects into our study, then randomize 50 subjects to the treatment group and 50 subjects to the control group. In this case, we have two independent samples and would use the unpaired form of the t-test. The randomization is not essential hereif we contacted 100 people by phone and obtained each person's age and gender, and then used a two-sample t-test to see whether the mean ages differ by gender, this would also be an independent samples t-test, even though the data are observational. Paired samples Paired samples t-tests typically consist of a sample of matched pairs of similar units, or one group of units that has been tested twice (a "repeated measures" t-test). A typical example of the repeated measures t-test would be where subjects are tested prior to a treatment, say for high blood pressure, and the same subjects are tested again after treatment with a blood-pressure lowering medication. By comparing the same patient's numbers before and after treatment, we are effectively using each patient as their own control. That way the correct rejection of the null hypothesis (here: of no difference made by the treatment) can become much more likely, with statistical power increasing simply because the random between-patient variation has now been eliminated.

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When should the t distribution be used?

Use it when the population standard deviation is not known. A large sample and an unknown population standard deviation ~technically the correct choice is the t distribution.

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Assumptions necessary to perform t tests:

1. That the observations are randomly selected 2. That the distribution is a normal distribution Sometimes the assumptions are not met, and individuals performing the t test still obtain valid results because the t test has a characteristic referred to as being robust. In other words, it can handle the violation of the assumptions.

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Equation for t score:

x t s/ n
The t distribution is similar to the standard normal distribution in that it is unimodal, bell-shaped, and symmetrical and extends infinitely in either direction.

ARTANA

The t distribution is similar to the standard normal distribution in that it is unimodal, bell-shaped, and symmetrical and extends infinitely in either direction.

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EXAMPLE

The following are the weight (mg) of each of 20 rats drawn at random from a large stock. Is it likely that the mean weight for the whole stock could be 24 mg, a value observed in some previous work?

9 14 15 15 16

18 18 19 19 20

21 22 22 24 24

26 27 29 30 32

Steps:
1. Questions to be answered Is the Mean weight of the sample of 20 rats 24 mg? N=20, x =21.0 mg, sd=5.91 , =24.0 mg

2. Null Hypothesis The mean weight of rats from the data is 24 mg. There is no significant difference between the calculated mean and the population mean. 3. Test statistics t x --- t0.5

s/ n

4.

5.

Comparison with theoretical value if tab t (n-1) < cal t (n-1) reject Ho, if tab t (n-1) > cal t (n-1) accept Ho, Inference

N=20, x =21.0 mg, sd=5.91 ,

=24.0 mg

x t s/ n
21 .0 24 t 2.30 5.91 20
t = t .05, 19 = 2.093 Accept H0 if t < 2.093 Reject H0 if t >= 2.093

Inference : Since the calculated value is - 2.30 and the tabulated value is 2.093, therefore the null hypothesis is rejected. Thus, it can be inferred that the mean from the sample is different from the population mean