In: Statistics and Probability
Describe what an ANOVA test is.
Compare it to a real world example
An ANOVA (“Analysis of Variance”) is a statistical technique that is used to determine whether or not there is a significant difference between the means of three or more independent groups.
Example
A large scale farm is interested in understanding which of three different fertilizers leads to the highest crop yield. They sprinkle each fertilizer on ten different fields and measure the total yield at the end of the growing season.
To understand whether there is a statistically significant difference in the mean yield that results from these three fertilizers, researchers can conduct a one-way ANOVA, using “type of fertilizer” as the factor and “crop yield” as the response.
If the overall p-value of the ANOVA is lower than our significance level (typically chosen to be 0.10, 0.05, 0.01) then we can conclude that there is a statistically significant difference in mean crop yield between the three fertilizers. We can then conduct post hoc tests to determine exactly which fertilizer lead to the highest mean yield.