Student's t test

The t-test is any statistical hypothesis test in which the test statistic follows a Student's t-distribution under the null hypothesis.

A t-test is most commonly applied when the test statistic would follow a normal distribution if the value of a scaling term in the test statistic were known. When the scaling term is unknown and is replaced by an estimate based on the data, the test statistics (under certain conditions) follow a Student's t distribution. The t-test can be used, for example, to determine if two sets of data are significantly different from each other.

The t-statistic was introduced in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, a chemist working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland. "Student" was his pen name.

Gosset had been hired owing to Claude Guinness's policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to apply biochemistry and statistics to Guinness's industrial processes. Gosset devised the t-test as an economical way to monitor the quality of stout. The Student's t-test work was submitted to and accepted in the journal Biometrika and published in 1908. Company policy at Guinness forbade its chemists from publishing their findings, so Gosset published his statistical work under the pseudonym "Student" (see Student's t-distribution for a detailed history of this pseudonym, which is not to be confused with the literal term student).

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