What is a hypothesis? Any question that has a cause and effect. Statistics is often used to try answer such questions:
Does IQ relate to school grades?
Does smoking cause cancer?
Do caps protect you from aliens?
All these questions are hypothesis.
To statistically test hypothesis, they must be broken into two parts:
The null hypothesis
The alternative hypothesis
The null hypothesis always asserts the theory is false, while the alternative assumes it is true.
Null: IQ doesn't affect school grades
Alternative: IQ affects school grades
Null: Smoking doesn't cause cancer
Alternative: Smoking causes cancer
Null: Caps do not protect you from aliens
Alternative: Caps protect you from aliens
Null: Not guilty
Alternative: Guilty
Tomorrow we will look at type I and type II errors
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment