8.1 - The philosophy of hypothesis testing

Along with confidence interval estimation, hypothesis testing is the other major field within statistical inference. We use testing when someone wants to make a claim about a population (for such purposes as research, advertising, decision making, etc.). This claim becomes a hypothesis that can be tested using the principles discussed in this section (and the methods discussed throughout the rest of this chapter).

In this section we will look at the basic nature and concept of a hypothesis test, and the philosophy behind how we conduct such a test.

Learning objectives

In this section you will learn about:

  1. testing in statistical inference, and what makes testing different to statistical estimation
  2. the sort of claims that can be tested in a hypothesis test
  3. the null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis
  4. one-sided and two-sided hypothesis tests
  5. the sort of conclusions we can draw once a hypothesis test has been conducted