Question

What do I really need to study before studying ANOVA?

I'm very behind in stats but I have a test coming up on Single factor ANOVA, Randomised Blocks, Two Way ANOVA and Tests for normality.

It's for a 2nd year course in Applied Statistics, I want to study but I don't know what I should revise first, confidence intervals? all of hypothesis tests? Apparently most of the work can be done on excel but I still need to understand the question before attempting.

Would appreciate any advice !

Answer 1

First of all, before studying ANOVA you should have the knowledge of testing of hypothesis. In ANOVA we test weather there is significant difference between groups or in other words we test the equality of means of several groups. Because there are several tests that can do same as by ANOVA, eg. in t test we test the same hypothesis of equality of mean as in we do in one way ANOVA. but problem is in t test we can compare only two groups but here we can compare several groups at once. In ANOVA we use variability between groups for the testing and this can be done by F test. So read the procedure of F test. For this you also need the concept of mean squared error and variability between and within two groups. After that you also need the concept of p-value and how its work to reject and accept the null hypothesis. You should also clear all the assumption we make in ANOVA. After understanding ANOVA you will find it very helpful while studying the concept of Randomized block. Hope this help.