Introduction
The practical application of statistics to engineering problems met in industry often concerns making decisions concerning probability distributions. For example you may be asked to decide whether a data set is approximately normal since much of the statistics you may apply makes this assumption. On occasions you may have to make such decisions given data concerning non-numeric variables in the form of a contingency table. Contingency tables are described in detail in this Workbook. This is one of the relatively rare occasions when hypothesis tests can be applied to non-numeric variables.
Prerequisites
- understand thoroughly what is meant by the term degrees of freedom
- have knowledge of the chi-squared distribution described in HELM booklet 40
Learning Outcomes
- explain the term contingency table
- perform hypothesis tests involving data given as a contingency table