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Equality of means/medians hypothesis test (independent samples)

An equality hypothesis test formally tests if two or more population means/medians are different.

The hypotheses to test depends on the number of samples:
  • For two samples, the null hypothesis states that the difference between the mean/medians of the populations is equal to a hypothesized value (0 indicating no difference), against the alternative hypothesis that it is not equal to (or less than, or greater than) the hypothesized value.
  • For more than two samples, the null hypothesis states that the means/medians of the populations are equal, against the alternative hypothesis that at least one population mean/median is different.

When the test p-value is small, you can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the populations differ in means/medians.

Tests for more than two samples are omnibus tests and do not tell you which groups differ from each other. You should use multiple comparisons to make these inferences.

Related concepts
Hypothesis testing
Multiple comparisons
Related tasks
Testing equality of means/medians
Related reference
Tests for means/medians
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Version 6.15
Published 18-Apr-2023
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