Introduction to statistical tests


Goal

The goal of this course is to give to the student the basic to the student on statistical test. This is a PhD.-level course for all students that have to perform hypothesis testing or solution comparison in their research. The main idea is to give better scientific grounds to the experience analysis that they have to carry-out for their study. The course is implemented using exercises in R.

At the end of the course, students would be able to:

  • Interpret a statistical test.
  • Be able to tell with a given confidence if solution A is better than solution B.
  • Determine how many experiments are required to achieve a given confidence interval.
  • Know how to do a Student t test (and its variants).

Organization

This is a crash course in 2 days organized as follows:
  1. First part
    • Basics on probability,
    • Basics on random variables(mean, variance, probability density, distribution function),
    • Compute functions on probability and random variable in R (random generation, quantile, etc.),
    • Law of large number, central-limit theorem.
  1. Second part
    • Introduction to R.
    • Exercises.
  1. Third part
    • Confidence interval of a mean:
      • Normal law case,
      • General case (Student t test).
    • Comparing paired or unpaired observation,
    • Confidence interval for one or two proportion,
    • Confidence interval for linear regression,
    • Hypothesis testing and P-value,
    • Determining the number of experiments.
  2. Forth part
    • Exercises on applications taken from the real world.

Material

The course material is:

Credits

Several exercices, examples, and ideas of this course have taken from: