医学统计学（扬州大学）Analysis of Variance - ANOVA.pdfVIP

Analysis of Variance - ANOVA Eleisa HeronEleisa Heron 30/09/09 Introduction • Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a method for testing the hypothesis that there is no difference between two or more population means (usually at least three) • Often used for testing the hypothesis that there is no difference between a number of treatments 30/09/09 ANOVA 2 Independent Two Sample t-test • Recall the independent two sample t-test which is used to test the null hypothesis that the population means of two groups are the same • Let and be the sample means of the two groups, then the test statistic for the independent t-test is given by: with and , sample sizes, , standard deviations • The test statistic is compared with the t-distribution with degrees of freedom (df) 30/09/09 ANOVA 3 Why Not Use t-test Repeatedly? • The t-test, which is based on the standard error of the difference between two means, can only be used to test differences between two means • With more than two means, could compare each mean with each other mean using t- tests • Conducting multiple t-tests can lead to severe inflation of the Type I error rate (false positives) and is NOT RECOMMENDED • ANOVA is used to test for differences among several means without increasing the Type I error rate • The ANOVA uses data from all groups to estimate standard errors, which can increase the power of the analysis 30/09/09 ANOVA 4 Why Look at Variance When Interested in Mea