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Statistical Tests

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10 views20 pages

Statistical Tests

Uploaded by

amnasadath
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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INTRODUCTION

TO BIOSTATISTICS
FOR EDEXCEL AS
LEVEL BIOLOGY
2023
PLATINUM BUSINESS ACADEMY – DR SHAKEEL JALEEL
Statistical tests
Predicting Inheritance: Chi-squared Test

• The difference between expected and observed results in experiments


can be statistically significant or insignificant (happened by chance)
• If the difference between results is statistically significant it can suggest
that something else is happening in the experiment that isn’t being
accounted for
o For example linkage between genes
• A statistical test called the chi-squared test determines whether there
is a significant difference between the observed and expected results
in an experiment
• The chi-squared test is completed when the data is categorical (data that
can be grouped)

Calculating chi-squared values

• Obtain the expected and observed results for the experiment


• Calculate the difference between each set of results
• Square each difference (as it is irrelevant whether the difference is
positive or negative)
• Divide each squared difference by the expected value and get a sum of
these answers to obtain the chi-squared value

Analysing chi-squared values

• To work out what the chi-squared value means, a table that relates chi-
squared values to probabilities is used
• If the chi-squared value represents a larger probability than the critical
probability then it can be stated that the differences between the
expected and observed results are due to chance
• If it represents a smaller probability than the critical probability then the
differences in results are significant and something else may be causing the
differences
• To determine the critical probability biologists generally use a probability
of 0.05 (they allow that chance will cause five out of every 100 experiments
to be different)
• The number of comparisons made must also be taken into account when
determining the critical probability. This is known as the degrees of
freedom

Worked example: Chi-squared test

An experiment was carried out investigating the inheritance of two genes in


rabbits; one for coat colour and one for ear length. A dihybrid cross revealed the
expected ratio of phenotypes to be 9 : 3 : 3 : 1. Several rabbits with the
heterozygous genotype were bred together and the phenotypes of all the
offspring were recorded. The ratio of the offspring was not exactly what was
predicted. In order to determine whether this was due to chance or for some
other reason, the chi-squared test was used.
In order to understand what this chi-squared value of 0.56 says about the data, a
table relaLng chi-squared values to probability is needed
• The chi-squared table displays the probabilities that the differences
between expected and observed are due to chance
• The degrees of freedom can be worked out from the results. It is calculated
by subtracting one from the number of classes
o In this example there are four phenotypes which means four classes,
4-1=3
o This means that the values in the third row are important for
comparison
• For this experiment, there is a critical probability of 0.05
o This means that 7.82 is the value used for comparison
• The chi-squared value from the results (0.56) is much smaller than 7.82
• 0.56 would be located somewhere to the left-hand side of the table,
representing a probability much greater than 0.1
• This means that there is no significant difference between the expected
and observed results, any differences that do occur are due to chance
Variation: t-test Method
• A statistical test called the t-test can be used to compare the means of two sets of
data and determine whether they are significantly different or not
o The formula for the t-test will be provided in the exam, but formulae for how
to calculate the number of degrees of freedom is not provided in the exam
and must be learnt
• The sets of data must follow a rough normal distribution, be continuous and
the standard deviations should be approximately equal
• The standard deviation (s) must be calculated for each data set before the t-test can be
carried out
• A null hypothesis should also be given
o This is a statement of what we would expect if there is no significant
difference between two means, and that any differences seen are due
to chance
• If there is a statistically significant difference between the means of two sets of data,
then the observation is not down to chance and the null hypothesis can be rejected

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