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is normally distributed with mean 0 and variance 1, since the sample mean ¯ is normally distributed with mean μ and variance σ 2 /n. Moreover, it is possible to show that these two random variables (the normally distributed one Z and the chi-squared-distributed one V) are independent.
Most frequently, t statistics are used in Student's t-tests, a form of statistical hypothesis testing, and in the computation of certain confidence intervals. The key property of the t statistic is that it is a pivotal quantity – while defined in terms of the sample mean, its sampling distribution does not depend on the population parameters, and thus it can be used regardless of what these ...
Most two-sample t-tests are robust to all but large deviations from the assumptions. [22] For exactness, the t-test and Z-test require normality of the sample means, and the t-test additionally requires that the sample variance follows a scaled χ 2 distribution, and that the sample mean and sample variance be statistically independent ...
One-sided normal tolerance intervals have an exact solution in terms of the sample mean and sample variance based on the noncentral t-distribution. [8] This enables the calculation of a statistical interval within which, with some confidence level, a specified proportion of a sampled population falls.
The table shown on the right can be used in a two-sample t-test to estimate the sample sizes of an experimental group and a control group that are of equal size, that is, the total number of individuals in the trial is twice that of the number given, and the desired significance level is 0.05. [4] The parameters used are:
This algorithm can easily be adapted to compute the variance of a finite population: simply divide by n instead of n − 1 on the last line.. Because SumSq and (Sum×Sum)/n can be very similar numbers, cancellation can lead to the precision of the result to be much less than the inherent precision of the floating-point arithmetic used to perform the computation.
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 .
The sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than due to a variant of Bessel's correction: In short, the sample covariance relies on the difference between each observation and the sample mean, but the sample mean is slightly correlated with each observation since it is defined in terms of all observations.