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This module teaches you about hypothesis testing through some super practical spatial and geospatial examples. I want you to come out the other end familiar with how and why we set up hypothesis tests, and how to carry them out yourself. In many ways, two-tailed hypothesis testing follows directly from the concept of confidence intervals to which you’ve already been introduced, so we’re going to build on that in order to cover the following:
- Three illustrative spatial examples that help ground our work and bring the concepts to life. They are: 1) deciding whether an instrument should be re-calibrated; 2) deciding whether one measurement among many repeated measurements of the same quantity appears to contain a gross error; and 3) using a loop misclosure to make a decision about whether one of its measurements appears to contain a gross error.
- The basic concept of a hypothesis test and how it relates to the concept of a confidence interval we studied earlier.
- What we mean by null and alternative hypotheses, and how to set them up.
- What we mean by a test statistic and how they’re calculated.
- Key steps and cheat sheets that help you make sense of the different cases that one needs to consider in practice (and avoid mistakes often made as a result of what I call statistics-by-Googling).
- Solutions to all of the examples.
- Some remarks on other cases and how what we will have seen here is different from a one-tailed hypothesis test.
My own notes
I’m still assuming that you’re building your own “perfect set of notes” as you go through this material – to make sure you have a succinct reference to help you be efficient on a test or in your future work. So, I’m sharing my own notes here with you to help with that.
The self-assessment problems
After the lessons below you’ll find some conceptual self-assessment problems to help you make sure you’ve got the fundamental concepts down. You’ll also find some applied self-assessment problems so you can round things out by putting your new knowledge to work.
If you’re taking this course from me as part of a university class then these self-assessments problems are the best way to study. I can’t ask exactly the same questions on a test, of course, but I do commit to you that I’ve designed the problems in a way that you can expect to do as well in the formal assessments as you can do on these self-assessment questions.
So, dig into these problems either after you’ve finished looking at the material or as you go. Hustle to figure out the answers. Leave no stone unturned. Get help if you need it. As with the notes, I’m going to assume you’re building the “perfect set of reference problems” to help you be efficient in a test or to look back at in practice.
Okay, now get started by clicking through the lessons below!
