Nonparametric statistics is a type of statistical analysis that makes minimal assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data being studied. Often these models are infinite-dimensional, rather than finite dimensional, as is parametric statistics. Nonparametric statistics can be used for descriptive statistics or statistical inference. Nonparametric tests are often used when the assumptions of parametric tests are evidently violated.
In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's ρ, named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek letter (rho) or as , is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation. It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function.
Mann–Whitney test is a nonparametric test of the null hypothesis that, for randomly selected values X and Y from two populations, the probability of X being greater than Y is equal to the probability of Y being greater than X.
The Kruskal–Wallis test by ranks, Kruskal–Wallis test, or one-way ANOVA on ranks is a non-parametric method for testing whether samples originate from the same distribution. It is used for comparing two or more independent samples of equal or different sample sizes. It extends the Mann–Whitney U test, which is used for comparing only two groups. The parametric equivalent of the Kruskal–Wallis test is the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).
A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than", or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of objects. It is not necessarily a total order of objects because two different objects can have the same ranking. The rankings themselves are totally ordered. For example, materials are totally preordered by hardness, while degrees of hardness are totally ordered. If two items are the same in rank it is considered a tie.
A random permutation is a random ordering of a set of objects, that is, a permutation-valued random variable. The use of random permutations is often fundamental to fields that use randomized algorithms such as coding theory, cryptography, and simulation. A good example of a random permutation is the shuffling of a deck of cards: this is ideally a random permutation of the 52 cards.
The Wilcoxon signed-rank test is a non-parametric rank test for statistical hypothesis testing used either to test the location of a population based on a sample of data, or to compare the locations of two populations using two matched samples. The one-sample version serves a purpose similar to that of the one-sample Student's t-test. For two matched samples, it is a paired difference test like the paired Student's t-test. The Wilcoxon test can be a good alternative to the t-test when population means are not of interest; for example, when one wishes to test whether a population's median is nonzero, or whether there is a better than 50% chance that a sample from one population is greater than a sample from another population.
The diehard tests are a battery of statistical tests for measuring the quality of a random number generator. They were developed by George Marsaglia over several years and first published in 1995 on a CD-ROM of random numbers. In 2006, the original diehard tests were extended into the dieharder tests.
A permutation test is an exact statistical hypothesis test making use of the proof by contradiction. A permutation test involves two or more samples. The null hypothesis is that all samples come from the same distribution . Under the null hypothesis, the distribution of the test statistic is obtained by calculating all possible values of the test statistic under possible rearrangements of the observed data. Permutation tests are, therefore, a form of resampling.
Wassily Hoeffding was a Finnish statistician and probabilist. Hoeffding was one of the founders of nonparametric statistics, in which Hoeffding contributed the idea and basic results on U-statistics.
The Friedman test is a non-parametric statistical test developed by Milton Friedman. Similar to the parametric repeated measures ANOVA, it is used to detect differences in treatments across multiple test attempts. The procedure involves ranking each row together, then considering the values of ranks by columns. Applicable to complete block designs, it is thus a special case of the Durbin test.
In statistics, a rank correlation is any of several statistics that measure an ordinal association—the relationship between rankings of different ordinal variables or different rankings of the same variable, where a "ranking" is the assignment of the ordering labels "first", "second", "third", etc. to different observations of a particular variable. A rank correlation coefficient measures the degree of similarity between two rankings, and can be used to assess the significance of the relation between them. For example, two common nonparametric methods of significance that use rank correlation are the Mann–Whitney U test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
In statistics, resampling is the creation of new samples based on one observed sample. Resampling methods are:
- Permutation tests
- Bootstrapping
- Cross validation
Kendall's W is a non-parametric statistic for rank correlation. It is a normalization of the statistic of the Friedman test, and can be used for assessing agreement among raters and in particular inter-rater reliability. Kendall's W ranges from 0 to 1.
In statistics, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient, commonly referred to as Kendall's τ coefficient, is a statistic used to measure the ordinal association between two measured quantities. A τ test is a non-parametric hypothesis test for statistical dependence based on the τ coefficient. It is a measure of rank correlation: the similarity of the orderings of the data when ranked by each of the quantities. It is named after Maurice Kendall, who developed it in 1938, though Gustav Fechner had proposed a similar measure in the context of time series in 1897.
In statistical hypothesis testing, the null distribution is the probability distribution of the test statistic when the null hypothesis is true. For example, in an F-test, the null distribution is an F-distribution. Null distribution is a tool scientists often use when conducting experiments. The null distribution is the distribution of two sets of data under a null hypothesis. If the results of the two sets of data are not outside the parameters of the expected results, then the null hypothesis is said to be true.
In statistics, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is a robust and nonparametric estimator of a population's location parameter. For populations that are symmetric about one median, such as the Gaussian or normal distribution or the Student t-distribution, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is a consistent and median-unbiased estimate of the population median. For non-symmetric populations, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator estimates the "pseudo–median", which is closely related to the population median.
The rank product is a biologically motivated rank test for the detection of differentially expressed genes in replicated microarray experiments. It is a simple non-parametric statistical method based on ranks of fold changes. In addition to its use in expression profiling, it can be used to combine ranked lists in various application domains, including proteomics, metabolomics, statistical meta-analysis, and general feature selection.
In statistics, the Siegel–Tukey test, named after Sidney Siegel and John Tukey, is a non-parametric test which may be applied to data measured at least on an ordinal scale. It tests for differences in scale between two groups.
In statistics, the Cucconi test is a nonparametric test for jointly comparing central tendency and variability in two samples. Many rank tests have been proposed for the two-sample location-scale problem. Nearly all of them are Lepage-type tests, that is a combination of a location test and a scale test. The Cucconi test was first proposed by Odoardo Cucconi in 1968.