09 - Tie-breakers for Sign Test

The goal of this project is to investigate a tie-breaking methods in sign test, a one sample non-parametric test. Non-parametric tests are widely used in statistical analysis due to their lack of assumptions about the distribution from which the data is coming. One of the non-parametric tests to test the one sample median is sign test. In practice, there could be observations in the sample which is same as the hypothesized median which are called "tied" observations. To deal with the tied observations there are several methods proposed which break the ties in order to apply the sign test. In this project, we started by studying some popular methods for tie breaking. We investigated and compared how these methods work for different sample sizes and different population distributions (known and unknown) by comparing coverage probabilities, and power of the tests. The project is further extended to Wilcoxon Signed Rank test which is another non-parametric one sample test. The optimal method for tie-breaking under the sign test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test would be determined for each case.

Nonparametric statistics

sign test

power of test 

Mid-Level

Knowledge

Women in Statistics and Data Science 2022