MathBench presents...

Table of Contents

• The Setup
• 1: When to use t-test
• 2: Looking at overlap
• 3: Finding a better way?
• 4: Standard deviation...
• The Standard Error
• 5: Detour of Doom
• 6: Standard Error
• 7: Lessons Learned
• The Rest of the Test
• 8: What to do with variability
• 9: Combining the standard errors
• 10: The lookup table
• 11: Putting it all together
• 12: Your turn again

Let's look at the data

Just to get an intuitive sense of what the t-test does, first try to plot all three sets of data on one graph:

Looking at the plot of the song length data, which two groups look the most similar? Which look the most different?

Intuitively, you could say that

• if two columns of song lengths 'overlap' by alot, then the lengths are similar.
• if the lengths don't overlap at all, then the lengths are different
• if the lengths overlap just a little... ???