10.1 Introduction to Statistical Inferences Using the Chi-Square Distribution

Have you ever wondered if lottery numbers were evenly distributed or if some numbers occurred with a greater frequency?  How about if the types of movies people preferred were different across different age groups?  What about if a coffee machine was dispensing approximately the same amount of coffee each time?  You could answer these questions by conducting a hypothesis test.

We will now study a new distribution called the [latex]\chi^2[/latex]-distribution.  Statistical inferences that use the [latex]\chi^2[/latex]-distribution can help us answer the types of questions posed above.  In this chapter, we will learn the three major applications of the [latex]\chi^2[/latex]-distribution: testing a single population variance, the goodness-of-fit test, and the test of independence.

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“Chapter 11 Introduction” in Introductory Statistics by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.