normality test

I looked carefully at ?shapiro.test and I did not see it state
anywhere what the null hypothesis is or what a low p-value means.  I
understand that I can run the example "shapiro.test(rnorm(100, mean =
5, sd = 3))" and deduce from its p-value of 0.0988 that the
null-hypothesis must be normality, but why can't the help page
explicitly state what the null hypothesis is.

I also understand that the help pages are not meant to "teach"
statistics, but stating the null hypothesis doesn't seem very
difficult given the already considerable amount of time that probably
went into creating these otherwise very good help pages.  Many people
who use this software took stats classes 10 or more years ago and this
stuff is easily forgotten.  Students frequently have trouble keeping
the null and alternative hypothesis straight.

Just my $0.02.

Thanks,

Roger

normality test

Thread (15 messages)