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Null Hypothesis || Evaluating Multiple Features

What is Null Hypothesis ?
What is p-value
What is Significance-Level ?
When to reject Null Hypothesis ?
What is P-Value ?

One of the main goals of statistical hypothesis testing is to estimate the P value, which is the probability of obtaining the observed results, or something more extreme, if the null hypothesis were true. If the observed results are unlikely under the null hypothesis, your reject the null hypothesis.


What is Null Hypothesis ?

The null hypothesis is a statement that you want to test. In general, the null hypothesis is that things are the same as each other, or the same as a theoretical expectation. For example, if you measure the size of the feet of male and female chickens, the null hypothesis could be that the average foot size in male chickens is the same as the average foot size in female chickens. If you count the number of male and female chickens born to a set of hens, the null hypothesis could be that the ratio of males to females is equal to a theoretical expectation of a 1:1 ratio.


What is Alternative Hypothesis ?

The alternative hypothesis is that things are different from each other, or different from a theoretical expectation. For example, one alternative hypothesis would be that male chickens have a different average foot size than female chickens; another would be that the sex ratio is different from 1:1.


What is Significance Level

The significance level, also denoted as alpha or α, is a measure of the strength of the evidence that must be present in your sample before you will reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the effect is statistically significant. The researcher determines the significance level before conducting the experiment.
The significance level is the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true. For example, a significance level of 0.05 indicates a 5% risk of concluding that a difference exists when there is no actual difference. Lower significance levels indicate that you require stronger evidence before you will reject the null hypothesis.
Use significance levels during hypothesis testing to help you determine which hypothesis the data support. Compare your p-value to your significance level. If the p-value is less than your significance level, you can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the effect is statistically significant. In other words, the evidence in your sample is strong enough to be able to reject the null hypothesis at the population level.


Test the Null Hypothesis

The primary goal of a statistical test is to determine whether an observed data set is so different from what you would expect under the null hypothesis that you should reject the null hypothesis. For example, let's say you are studying sex determination in chickens.
For breeds of chickens that are bred to lay lots of eggs, female chicks are more valuable than male chicks, so if you could figure out a way to manipulate the sex ratio, you could make a lot of chicken farmers very happy.
You've fed chocolate to a bunch of female chickens before giving birth (in birds, unlike mammals, the female parent determines the sex of the offspring), and you get 25 female chicks and 23 male chicks. Anyone would look at those numbers and see that they could easily result from chance; there would be no reason to reject the null hypothesis of a 1:1 ratio of females to males.
If you got 47 females and 1 male, most people would look at those numbers and see that they would be extremely unlikely to happen due to luck, you would reject the null hypothesis and conclude that chocolate really changed the sex ratio. However, what if you had 31 females and 17 males? That's definitely more females than males, but is it really so unlikely to occur due to chance that you can reject the null hypothesis?
To answer that, you need more than common sense, you need to calculate the probability of getting a deviation that large due to chance.


Calculating the Probablity

In the figure above, I used the BINOMDIST function of Excel to calculate the probability of getting each possible number of males, from 0 to 48, under the null hypothesis that 0.5 are male.
We have sample size of 48 ie 48 chicks and according to our Null Hypothesis, 24 chicks should be Male and 24 should be female with 5 percent error acceptance.
As you can see, the probability of getting 17 males out of 48 total chickens is about 0.015. That seems like a pretty small probability, doesn't it?
However, that's the probability of getting exactly 17 males. What you want to know is the probability of getting 17 or fewer males. If you were going to accept 17 males as evidence that the sex ratio was biased, you would also have accepted 16, or 15, or 14,… males as evidence for a biased sex ratio. You therefore need to add together the probabilities of all these outcomes. The probability of getting 17 or fewer males out of 48, under the null hypothesis, is 0.030. That means that if you had an infinite number of chickens, half males and half females, and you took a bunch of random samples of 48 chickens, 3.0% of the samples would have 17 or fewer males.
This number, 0.030, is the P value. It is defined as the probability of getting the observed result, or a more extreme result, if the null hypothesis is true. So "P=0.030" is a shorthand way of saying "The probability of getting 17 or fewer male chickens out of 48 total chickens, IF the null hypothesis is true that 50% of chickens are male, is 0.030."


When to reject null hypothesis?

Use a significance level of 0.05. This means that if the P value is less than 0.05, you reject the null hypothesis; if P is greater than or equal to 0.05, you don't reject the null hypothesis.

False positives vs. false negatives

After you do a statistical test, you are either going to reject or accept the null hypothesis. Rejecting the null hypothesis means that you conclude that the null hypothesis is not true; in our chicken sex example, you would conclude that the true proportion of male chicks, if you gave chocolate to an infinite number of chicken mothers, would be less than 50%.
When you reject a null hypothesis, there's a chance that you're making a mistake. The null hypothesis might really be true, and it may be that your experimental results deviate from the null hypothesis purely as a result of chance. In a sample of 48 chickens, it's possible to get 17 male chickens purely by chance; it's even possible (although extremely unlikely) to get 0 male and 48 female chickens purely by chance, even though the true proportion is 50% males. This is why we never say we "prove" something in science; there's always a chance, however miniscule, that our data are fooling us and deviate from the null hypothesis purely due to chance. When your data fool you into rejecting the null hypothesis even though it's true, it's called a "false positive," or a "Type I error." So another way of defining the P value is the probability of getting a false positive like the one you've observed, if the null hypothesis is true.
Another way your data can fool you is when you don't reject the null hypothesis, even though it's not true. If the true proportion of female chicks is 51%, the null hypothesis of a 50% proportion is not true, but you're unlikely to get a significant difference from the null hypothesis unless you have a huge sample size. Failing to reject the null hypothesis, even though it's not true, is a "false negative" or "Type II error." This is why we never say that our data shows the null hypothesis to be true; all we can say is that "We haven't rejected the null hypothesis"

    Important Points to be noted:
  • Most times we take the significance level to be 0.05
  • We compare significance level with p-value if the significance level > p-value then we can reject the null hypothesis
  • If p value > 0.1 little or no evidence against null hypothesis
  • If our Null hypothesis is true then the distribution is mostly a Normal/Gaussian Distribution
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