Chapter 17
Nonparametric Statistics
IN THIS CHAPTER
Introducing non-parametric statistics
Testing independent samples
Testing related samples
Correlating ranks
The statistical methods I cover in earlier chapters have a couple of things in common. First, you assume ratio (or at least interval) data. (If you don’t know what I mean, go read the section about types of data in Chapter 1.) Second, you can use sample statistics to estimate parameters of the sampling distribution, and you use the central limit theorem to characterize the nature of the distribution so that you can test hypotheses.
Sometimes you have to analyze nominal data or ordinal data. (Again, see Chapter 1.) And sometimes you can’t specify the distribution of the variable you’re working with.
To deal with these cases, statisticians have developed nonparametric statistical tests. The list of these tests is long and growing all the time. Many of them require special lookup tables for hypothesis tests.
I want to avoid those special tables. So, to make the cut for this chapter, a test had to either (a) test hypotheses via ...
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