Business Statistics For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14

Applications of the F-Distribution

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing the F-distribution

Testing hypotheses about the equality of two population variances

Choosing a level of significance

This chapter introduces the F-distribution. The F-distribution is used for several applications in statistics, such as testing hypotheses about three or more population means, testing the quality of results in regression analysis, and testing hypotheses about two population variances. In this chapter, I introduce the key properties of the F-distribution and show you how to test hypotheses about two population variances.

Getting to Know the F-Distribution

The F-distribution is a continuous probability distribution, which means that it is defined for an infinite number of different values. (Continuous probability distributions, such as the normal distribution, are introduced in Chapter 9.) The F-distribution was named after the renowned statistician Sir Ronald Fisher (1890–1962).

The F-distribution shares one important property with the Student’s t-distribution (introduced in Chapter 11): Probabilities are determined by a concept known as degrees of freedom (df). Unlike the Student’s t-distribution, ...