Week 7: Hypothesis testing#

STATS 60 Spring 2025

  • 10 bonus points for attendance

  • 10 bonus points for completing assignment


Discussion assignment (extra credit, bonus points: 10 + up to 5 additional points):#

Choose a pattern or trend that you have observed on Stanford campus, then design a hypothesis test to determine whether it is statistically significant. In the following Google Form:

  1. Describe the pattern or trend.

  2. Formulate it as a hypothesis test: what is the null hypothesis? Describe it in both plain English, as well as formulating it as a probabilistic experiment.

  3. Explain how to compute the \(p\)-value, and then use Colab to compute it. You may find this example to be a useful starting point.

  4. Did you reject the null hypothesis?

  5. What is the alternative hypothesis? If applicable, what is the type-2 error (false negative rate) for your hypothesis test?

If your example is chosen for presentation in discussion, you get 5 additional bonus points.


Discussion Agenda#

Show and tell (5 minutes)#

The discussion instructor selects the top example of a trend + hypothesis test.

The student curator explains their example, and the class goes through the test analysis.

Overview of concepts from the week (10 minutes)#

Discussion instructor reviews key concepts from the week.

Activity: (35 minutes)#

Facial stereotypes hypothesis testing.

Activity:

  1. Students see two photos of faces, and have to decide which face corresponds to a given name. Students vote.

  2. Working in small groups (with TA leading a discussion/recap after each step), perform a hypothesis test on the data to decide if there is facial stereotyping:

    • What is the null hypothesis?

    • What is the alternative hypothesis?

    • What is the \(p\)-value of the outcome observed in class?

    • Should we reject the null hypothesis? What are the false positive (type 1 error) and false negative (type 2 error) rates for our test?

    • What is the family-wise error rate across all \(5\) sections of STATS 60 (assuming each section has \(15\) attendees)?