Statistical Hypothesis
statistical hypothesis
[stə′tis·tə·kəl hī′päth·ə·səs]Statistical Hypothesis
an assumed statement on the probabilistic regularities obeyed by a phenomenon under study. A statistical hypothesis generally specifies the form of the probability distribution or the values of the parameters of the distribution.
A hypothesis that completely specifies the distribution is said to be simple. Any nonsimple hypothesis is said to be composite and can be represented as a class of simple hypotheses. An example of a composite hypothesis is the hypothesis that the probability distribution is a normal distribution with mathematical expectation a = a0 and some unknown variance σ2. The simple hypotheses here are a = a0 and σ2 = , where a0 and are specified numbers.