The Science of Life

As promised last time , I am going to cover hypothesis testing of proportions.  This is conceptually similar to hypothesis testing from the mean and standard deviation , but the calculations are going to be different. A proportion is the percentage of success in a sample or population, reported in decimal form.  This means that if heads comes up 50% of the time, then it is reported as p=0.50.  Because of this, the calculations are different than that of the mean and standard deviation case from last time.  For instance, when we have proportion data, we don't know the standard deviation of either the sample or the population.  This means that the standard error calculation cannot be performed as typical.  We must instead use a proportion-specific version, which is given by $\sigma_{E}=\sqrt{\frac{p*(1-p)}{n}}$, where p is the proportion and n is the sample size.  If we have the sample size and the number of successes, we can calculate the proporti...