# Hypothesis testing

One of the most important parts of statistics is being able to determine if a model is accurate and having rigorous ways of describing its accuracy. This can take the form of assessing how well a model matches data or which of several candidate models best match data The process of answering these questions is known as hypothesis testing.

## Determining if a model is consistent with data

We will discuss the seemingly straightforward scenario of having a model and a dataset and asking whether the data is "consistent" with the model. Depending on one's philosophy, there are a number of ways to think about what "consistent" means in concrete mathematical terms.

The classical frequentist way of answering this question was pioneered by Fischer and is based on a calculated quantity known as the "p-value". Given a model and a dataset, the p-value is defined as the probability of that model generating that dataset OR generating a dataset "more extreme" than the measured dataset. The logical underpinning of this calculation is answer the question, "Is my data so rare given my model that I should reject my model?". If the model is very likely to generate the given dataset, or if it is likely to generate data that is even more "extreme", then one intuitively should not reject the model based on the measured data. If I flip a coin and get 2 heads in a row, but I know that the odds of getting even 3 heads in a row given a fair coin aren't SO low, then I shouldn't conclude that my coin isn't fair. If I roll a dice and get 2 1s in a row, but I know that the total probability of getting the any number twice in a row isn't so low, then I shouldn't conclude that my dice is somehow faulty.

It is clear how to calculate the probability of the measured dataset given the model, but it remains to be defined what hypothetical datasets should be included in the set of "more extreme" data. This definition may vary depending on the problem. These definitions of "extreme" may include:

• Any dataset that is equally likely or less likely than the measured dataset
• In the case of 1-d data, any value that is less likely than the measured data and is on the same side relative to the mode of the distribution as the measured data (one-sided p-value).
• Any dataset having some chosen summary statistic whose probability is less than or equal to the value of the summary statistic calculated on the observed data

There are numerous other ways, and choosing a good definition of more extreme data is an important part of conducting a good model comparison. It depends on the problem and the statistical argument that one is attempting to make.

I'll emphasize that this procedure is merely a heuristic. It is meant to be a check that should be considered when comparing data and a model. It should not be interpreted religiously and has little meaning outside of its definition.

Given the definition of a p-value, a typical p-value test consists of the following steps:

• Determine in advance a p-value threshold that will be used to conclude if the model and data are consistent or not. A typical values is 0.05 (5%).
• Measure your data and calculate the p-value using the model
• If the p-value is < the threshold value, then conclude that the data and model are inconsistent. If not, maintain belief that they are consistent.

## Determining which of multiple models best fits data

The case when there are only two possible models describing a phenomenon, where only one of which is true, is known as a "Simple Hypothesis". Typically, these models are thought of asymmetrically: one model, known as the "Null Hypothesis" and here referred to as $H_0$, is thought of as the current understanding of the world and the other model, known as the "Alternate Hypothesis" and here referred to as $H_1$, is the challenger theory which, depending on the data, may unseat the null hypothesis.

The name "Simple Hypothesis" does not mean that the models corresponding to the two hypotheses themselves have to be "simple": The data being generated can be high dimensional and the models can have a complicated functional form. The only requirement is that there only be 2 possible models and that those models have no free or unknown parameters.

This version of hypothesis testing ultimately boils down to considering the possible space of data and labeling certain regions of that space as supporting $H_0$ and other regions as supporting $H_1$ in a way that fully partitions the space. If the data lands in a region of space that supports $H_0$, you maintain the null hypothesis and reject the alternate hypothesis. Otherwise, you reject the null and support this alternate hypothesis. There are a number of properties to consider when determining these partitions.

Any partitioning of the space can be considered in terms of the following:

• The probability of rejecting the null hypothesis GIVEN THAT the null hypothesis is actually true
• The probability of continuing to support the null hypothesis GIVEN THAT the alternative hypothesis is true

Rejecting the null hypothesis when it is actually true is known as a "Type 1 Error", and the probability of a "Type 1 Error" often called the "size" of a hypothesis test. The probability of accepting the alternative hypothesis when the alternative hypothesis is indeed true is known as "power". Intuitively, one would like to partition space in a way that minimizes the probability of a "Type 1 Error" and maximizes the power. Note that the size of the test and power are determined by how one partitions the data space into $H_0$ and $H_1$ regions and not by the data itself. These can be determined before you even run your experiment and observe the data, as long as you know what your two hypothesis are.

In this language, this process of testing a Simple Hypothesis is easy. You can just partition the space however you choose, measure your data, pick $H_0$ or $H_1$ based on your partitioning, and then go home. But, clearly, some partitioning must be better than others, so let's figure out what it means to be "better" and how to actually calculate those partitions that have the property of being "better".

The typical way to think about these properties and the constraints on the data space partitions that on draws is the following:

• Pick a fixed value for the size of the test (the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis GIVEN that it's true)
• Find the distribution of your data given $H_0$ and $H_1$. Typically, this is done by calculating a single value representative of your data (a "summary statistic") and finding the probability distribution of that single-valued summary statistic given both hypotheses. For high dimensional data, this is often easier to contemplate and visualize.
• Using those distributions, find the partitioning of the data space that maximizes the power of the test given the chosen size of the test. This partitioning fully specifies the test.

Typically, people choose a size of the test to be 0.05 (5% chance of wrongly rejecting the null hypothesis), or one of a few other well-rounded numbers. From there, they strive to pick regions that have high power.

Fortunately, in the case of a Simple Hypothesis, there is a way to find a division of space between the null and alternate hypothesis that maximizes the power of the test for a fixed value of the size of the test. This procedure can be proven, and the proof is called the NeymanPearson Lemma.

The lemma simply states that on should parameterize the partitions of space by a single parameter, $\eta$, which is defined by:

In other words, one should consider contours defined by the likelihood ratio of the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis. Given those contours, the size of the test then fully determines the partitioning of the space: just pick the $H_0$ region such that the total probability of the region (given the null hypothesis) corresponds to the size of the test.

As far as things go in statistics, this is thus a solved problem. If you are really in the case where you have only two possible models that could describe your problem, you should then delight. However, that is rarely, if ever, the case. Most problems have many possible models and each model has many parameters that are initially unknown, and this makes the problem of hypothesis testing much more challenging. Moreover, one rarely knows the exact distribution of a function, and therefore cannot readily calculate the Likelihood and use it in the Neyman-Pearson Lemma.