There are other ways to do it, and there are conditions under which that assumption can be relaxed.
So what's the most appropriate method?
I have to run now, but if you'd like, I can play around with a couple of different measures when I get home, to see what comes out.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
In addition, the t-test requires equality of variances as Jake pointed out. The t-test for equality of means is a sad example of a test that is taught because it can be done in closed form on a blackboard rather than because its conditions actually obtain in real life. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
It is not at all obvious that the ratio of indictees to civilians in that case should follow any given distribution, for instace a Gaussian. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
All members of the ethnic group in the whole former Yugoslavia? In the relevant republic? The number of combatants? Or would you expect the number of indictees to be independent of the size of the ethnic group? How about proportionality to the number of dead civilians in other factions, etc?
All this for an unbiased court. You can then quantify the deviations from the model. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
You'd probably end up with a test for the parameter of a Poisson distribution or something, not a mean and standard deviation of a Gaussian. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
And then you can do a test for the rate of conviction which is a Bernouilli test. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
