The ANOVA Process

Written by: Garrett Herr March 12, 2013

Audience and Scope: The audience for this document is for students majoring in Statistics at Penn State University who will be taking STAT 461, the ANOVA class that is offered at Penn State. This document will describe how the ANOVA process works, why each step is taken, and the mechanics behind how each step helps us come to a sound, statistical conclusion.

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The ANOVA process is a process used by statisticians to analyze data when you are looking to compare specific aspects of that data. This process has its roots in agricultural research, mainly in testing the effects of different variables on crops. An ANOVA is a statistical process used to compare the means of multiple different treatment levels. The assumptions that you have to make are that the variation within the different treatments is the same, the variable that you are testing is normally distributed and the data points are gathered randomly. Basically what you are testing is whether all of the means of different treatment levels are the same. The conclusions that you can make from this are whether are not a certain treatment is better or worse compared to other treatments. The one main idea behind the ANOVA test is the difference between within group variation and between group variation. Within group variation describes the variation that occurs in the data points that are within each treatment level. The between group variation describes the variation that occurs in the data points collectively between the different treatment levels. Knowing this is very important when you are conducting an ANOVA test because knowing the ratio of between group variation compared to within group variation will help you make the final conclusion. The first step of an ANOVA test is to state the null and alternative hypothesis for the test. These hypotheses are important because they tell you what you are trying to test for. The null hypothesis will always be the same for all ANOVA testing. It will be that all means are the same. This is because the main reason for doing an ANOVA test is to see if treatment levels are different. The null hypothesis is always what is considered true before the test, so we will first suppose that all the means are equal. The alternative hypothesis will then be that just one of the means is different from another mean. The alternative hypothesis is what we are trying to show is true. This is the opposite of the null hypothesis because we are trying to show that the null hypothesis is false, and therefore accept the alternative hypothesis. We are also just testing to see if one mean is different because the reason of most ANOVA tests is to find what treatment is different, so if just one mean is different, we have significant results. This step is normally written as: H0: 1= 2== n where n=number of treatment levels HA: Not all means are equal. The second step of an ANOVA test is to calculate the F statistic for the data, which is used to make the decision on the null hypothesis.