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:
- Describe the pattern or trend. 
- 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. 
- 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. 
- Did you reject the null hypothesis? 
- 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:
- Students see two photos of faces, and have to decide which face corresponds to a given name. Students vote. 
- 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)? 
 
