Tuesday, January 30, 2018

What is a Student’s t-test?

I’m taking a statistics course on line through Coursera, and this is quite a challenge since my last high school math was in 1955, and although this class is not “math,” the instructor certainly uses words like fraction, percentage and square root.  So I find myself often going to Google to find explanations.  Today (week 5 of a 6 week class) the instructor (who is from Cape Town and has a bit of an accent in English) told us about Student’s t-test.  The reason it’s called that is the man who came up with this test worked for a brewery, and had to publish anonymously. Since it is now known who he was, I don’t know why they don’t just call it the Gosset t-test. Maybe statisticians are a little OCD?

I’m using this video to flesh out what the instructor told us—I watched his video twice and still didn’t get it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTmLQvMM-1M

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