Statistics in Water Resources, Lecture 6

• Key theme
– T-distribution for distributions where standard
deviation is unknown
– Hypothesis testing
– Comparing two sets of data to see if they are
different
• Reading: Helsel and Hirsch, Chapter 6
Matched Pair Tests
 Chi-Square Distribution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-square_distribution
 t-, z and ChiSquare

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student's_t-distribution
 Normal and t-distributions

Normal

t-dist for ν = 1 t-dist for ν = 2 t-dist for ν = 3

t-dist for ν = 5 t-dist for ν = 10 t-dist for ν = 30

 Standard Normal and Student - t
• Standard Normal z • Student’s t-distribution
– X1, … , Xn are – Applies to the case
independently where the true standard
distributed (μ,σ), and deviation σ is unknown
and is replaced by its
sample estimate Sn

– then
is normally distributed with
mean 0 and std dev 1
p-value is the probability of obtaining the value of the
test-statistic if the null hypothesis (Ho) is true

If p-value is very small (<0.05 or 0.025) then reject Ho

If p-value is larger than α then do not reject Ho

6
One-sided test
Two-sided test
Helsel and Hirsch p.120
Box and Whisker Plots of the N data
Precipitation Water Quality at two
sites
Ranked Precipitation Quality Data

Mean concentration is nearly the same

but ranks suggest residential
concentration is smaller. Is this so?
Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test
Helsel and Hirsch p. 462

This is < 0.05 for a one-sided test, Test sum Test sum
thus reject Ho and say residential of higher of lower
concentration is lower than ranks ranks
industrial

p-value in middle is for P(Wrs > X)

or P(Wrs < X*) for m = n = 10

Note that the sum of n = 1, 2, ….

20 = 210 and X + X* = 210 in all
cases in this table.
p-value is 0.024 for
Rank sum of 78.5