Null Hypothesis

The null hypothesis is a statistical concept introduced by Sir Ronald Fisher in 1935 as part of a statistical strategy called significance testing. Significance testing is a technique for evaluating whether effects found in a sample are also present in the population from which the sample was drawn or whether its presence in the sample reflects sampling error. The term effect is a general one that can refer to any quantitative relationship, pattern, or difference between means or other statistics that interests the researcher. Sampling error refers to the tendency of samples to differ from expectation. For example, if you flip a fair coin 10 times you expect 5 heads (and 5 tails), but any sample of 10 coin flips could result in anywhere from ...

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