statistics

Hypothesis testing

Hypothesis testing: procedure

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We ask a yes/no question about a population.

We answer the question yes, and answer the question no, using symbols for the population means.

We label one answer the null hypothesis and the other answer the alternative hypothesis.

We decide the criterion for rejecting the null hypothesis. The test is one of: two-tailed, right-tailed, or left-tailed. We take a sample, and calculate our test statistic (Z or t for now)

We find if the observed test statistic is in the rejection region (critical region or tail) of the distribution.

If the statistic is in the rejection region, we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hyopthesis.

If the statistic is not in the rejection region, we retain the null hypothesis, and do not accept the alternative hypothesis.

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