t-test behavior given that the null hypothesis is true
On 09-Jan-2013 08:50:46 Pavlos Pavlidis wrote:
Dear all, I observer a strange behavior of the pvalues of the t-test under the null hypothesis. Specifically, I obtain 2 samples of 3 individuals each from a normal distribution of mean 0 and variance 1. Then, I calculate the pvalue using the t-test (var.equal=TRUE, samples are independent). When I make a histogram of pvalues I see that consistently the bin of the smallest pvalues has a lower frequency. Is this a known behavior of the t-test or it's a kind of bug/random number generation problem? kind regards, idaios
Using the following code, I did not observe the behavious you describe.
The histograms are consistent with a uniform distribution of the
P-values, and the lowest bin for the P-values (when the code is
run repeatedly) is not consistently lower (or higher, or anything
else) than the other bins.
## My code:
N <- 10000
Ps <- numeric(N)
for(i in (1:N)){
X1 <- rnorm(3,0,1) ; X2 <- rnorm(3,0,1)
Ps[i] <- t.test(X1,X2,var.equal=TRUE)$p.value
}
hist(Ps)
################################################
If you would post the code you used, the reason why you are observing
this may become more evident!
Hoping this helps,
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at wlandres.net>
Date: 09-Jan-2013 Time: 10:29:21
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