In this unit you will learn about hypothesis testing as a general framework, and will then apply this general framework to some of the most common statistical tests that you might come across. We have two goals with this:
- That you build an understanding of the general framework for hypothesis testing—generate a test-statistic that has a known distribution under your sampling strategy, and compare the particular value that you generate against the known distribution of this statistic. This framework serves as the basis for frequentist inference, and will be put to considerable use when we turn toward regression inference.
- That you build an immediately useful set of skills that can be applied to data.
In the first part of this week's work we will introduce this general frequentist approach, in the second part we will introduce you to the t-test as a way to use p-values to assess our confidence in a finding, and in the third part we will ask you to put findings into context.
Compared to previous weeks, we have designed this week to be a slightly easier workload. We are still excited about what you will learn, but we want to give a little less pressure this week than others.