Stat 502

Homework 1
Assigned 10/4/10
Due 10/11/10
1. Bacteria cultures: Biochemists are interested in comparing the amount of bacteria that grow
under two dierent temperature regimes, high and low. In a completely randomized design, 25
plates were assigned the high regime and the remaining assigned low. After a growth period,
bacterial counts were made on all plates, measured in 10
8
cells/mL. The data are in the Hw1 di-
rectory, and can be read into R with the command read.table("bact.dat",header=TRUE).
(a) Exploratory data analysis: Make a table reporting the sample means, medians and
standard deviations for the two treatment groups. Plot the CDFs for the two groups.
(b) Hypothesis tests:
i. For these data, compute the t-statistic, the KS-statistic and the variance ratio statis-
tic max{s
2
1
/s
2
2
, s
2
2
/s
2
1
}, where s
2
j
is the sample variance for the jth group.
ii. Obtain and plot histograms of the randomization distributions for each statistic,
and indicate the observed value of the test statistics on the plots.
iii. Obtain the p-values based on each statistic. What are your conclusions about the
dierences between treatment B versus A?
(c) Error rates: Suppose your decision procedure was to compute the three p-values associ-
ated with each test statistic and then reject H
0
if any of them were below 0.05. Would
your type-I error rate be above, equal to, or below 0.05? Why?
2. Null p-values: Let Y be the random outcome of an experiment and g(Y ) a test statistic.
Further, let g
1
denote the 1- quantile of the null distribution of g(Y ). Finally, let X be
a hypothetical re-running of the experiment, and let p(Y ) = Pr(g(X) g(Y )|H
0
) be the
p-value, based on observing Y . Note that, before the experiment is run, the outcome Y is
random and so g(Y ) is random as well.
(a) Draw a diagram involving a null distribution to show that p(Y ) < if and only if
g(Y ) > g
1
.
(b) Calculate mathematically the distribution of the p-value under H
0
, that is, nd Pr(p(Y ) <
|H
0
). Name this well-known distribution.
3. (Randomization test): Consider two possible experimental designs for a small pilot study on
six experimental units.
R1. For each unit, the researcher ips a coin and assigns treatment A if the coin is heads,
and B if the coin is tails.
R2. The researcher shues six cards, three black and three red. The ith unit is assigned A
if the ith card is red, and is assigned black otherwise.
(a) Write out three possible treatment assignments for each randomization scheme.
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(b) Write out a treatment assignment that is possible under R1 but not under R2.
(c) Find the number of possible treatment assignments under R1 and R2.
(d) Suppose the test statistic is |

Y
B


Y
A
|. Find the smallest value that any p-value could
take, under each of R1 and R2.
4. Review of the expectation and variance: Let Y
1,a
, . . . , Y
na,a
be independent samples from
a population with mean
a
and standard deviation
a
, and Y
1,b
, . . . , Y
n
b
,b
be independent
samples from a population with mean
b
and standard deviation
b
. Additionally, the a and
b samples are independent of each other. Compute the following quantities using only the
denition of expectation and variance, and showing all steps.
(a) E[c
1
+ c
2
Y
1,a
], Var[c
1
+ c
2
Y
1,a
]
(b) E[s
2
a
]
(c) E[

Y
a
], Var[

Y
a
]
(d) E[

Y
a


Y
b
], Var[

Y
a


Y
b
]
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