Wednesday, January 16, 2013

CHI SQUARE

A chi-square test is a statistical test commonly used for testing independence and goodness of fit. Testing independence determines whether two or more observations across two populations are dependent on each other (that is, whether one variable helps to estimate the other). Testing for goodness of fit determines if an observed frequency distribution matches a theoretical frequency distribution. In both cases the equation to calculate the chi-square statistic is where O equals the observed frequency and Ethe expected frequency. The results of a chi-square test, along with the degrees of freedom, are used with a previously calculated table of chi-square distributions to find a p-value. The p-value can then be used to determine the significance of the test.

There are two types of random variables and they yield two types of data: numerical and categorical. A chi square (X2) statistic is used to investigate whether distributions of categorical variables differ from one another. Basically categorical variable yield data in the categories and numerical variables yield data in numerical form. Responses to such questions as "What is your major?" or Do you own a car?" are categorical because they yield data such as "biology" or "no." In contrast, responses to such questions as "How tall are you?" or "What is your G.P.A.?" are numerical. Numerical data can be either discrete or continuous.



No comments:

Post a Comment