Chapter 8 - Hypothesis Testing

# **8-1 Basics of Hypothesis Testing**

* A **hypothesis** is a claim or statement about a property of a population
* A **hypothesis test** (or test of significance) is a procedure for testing a claim about a property of a population
* The **null hypothesis** (denoted by H subscript 0) is a statement that the value of a population parameter is equal to some claimed value
* The **alternative hypothesis** (denoted by H subscript a) is a statement that the parameter has a value that somehow differs from the null hypothesis. For the methods of this chapter, the symbolic form of the alternative hypothesis must use one of these symbols: