R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Performing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test

A one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is used to compare a sample with a reference probability. A two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test compares the cumulative distributions of two datasets. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to perform the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with R.

Getting ready

Ensure that mtcars has already been loaded into a data frame within an R session. As the ks.test function is originated from the stats package, make sure the stats library is loaded.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps:

1. Validate whether the dataset, x (generated with the rnorm function), is distributed normally with a one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test:

   > x = rnorm(50)
   > ks.test(x,"pnorm")
   
    One-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov ...