[R] help comparing two median with R
Greg Snow
Greg.Snow at intermountainmail.org
Wed Apr 18 20:29:34 CEST 2007
For testing, the permutation test may be prefered to the bootstrap
(though the bootstrap could be used for a confidence interval).
I remember in grad school doing a project on comparing the efficiency of
a permutation test on medians compared to the MannWhitney test, but I
don't remember the specifics of when each was better. Do any of the
other participants in this discussion have any ideas on how the
permutation tests compare to what else has been discussed?
The MannWhitney test is actually a special case of the permutation test,
but using the median permutation test is more intuitive to my mind. The
permutation test is actually testing the null hypothesis that the 2
distributions are identical, but no assumptions about normality,
skewness, shift hypotheses, etc.. Though the efficiency of the test
statistic used would depend somewhat on the nature of the alternatives
of interest (imagine 2 distributions with the same mean, but different
medians, or same median, but different mean; a permutation test
comparing means or medians would differ in the 2 cases).
I'll have to try some simulations looking at a permutation test on
efron's dice.
--
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
(801) 408-8111
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> Cody_Hamilton at edwards.com
> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:06 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] help comparing two median with R
>
>
> Has anyone proposed using a bootstrap for Pedro's problem?
>
> What about taking a boostrap sample from x, a boostrap sample
> from y, take the difference in the medians for these two
> bootstrap samples, repeat the process 1,000 times and
> calculate the 95th percentiles of the 1,000 computed
> differences? You would get a CI on the difference between
> the medians for these two groups, with which you could
> determine whether the difference was greater/less than zero.
> Too crude?
>
> Regards,
> -Cody
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Frank E Harrell
>
> Jr
>
> <f.harrell at vander
> To
> bilt.edu> Thomas Lumley
>
> Sent by:
> <tlumley at u.washington.edu>
> r-help-bounces at st
> cc
> at.math.ethz.ch
> r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>
> Subject
> Re: [R] help comparing
> two median
> 04/18/2007 05:02 with R
>
> AM
>
>
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> Thomas Lumley wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> >
> >> The points that Thomas and Brian have made are certainly
> correct, if
> >> one is truly interested in testing for differences in medians or
> >> means. But the Wilcoxon test provides a valid test of x > y more
> >> generally. The test is consonant with the Hodges-Lehmann
> estimator:
> >> the median of all possible differences between an X and a Y.
> >>
> >
> > Yes, but there is no ordering of distributions (taken one
> at a time)
> > that agrees with the Wilcoxon two-sample test, only
> orderings of pairs
> > of distributions.
> >
> > The Wilcoxon test provides a test of x>y if it is known a
> priori that
> > the two distributions are stochastically ordered, but not
> under weaker
> > assumptions. Otherwise you can get x>y>z>x. This is in contrast to
> > the t-test, which orders distributions (by their mean)
> whether or not
> > they are stochastically ordered.
> >
> > Now, it is not unreasonable to say that the problems are
> unlikely to
> > occur very often and aren't worth worrying too much about. It does
> > imply that it cannot possibly be true that there is any
> summary of a
> > single distribution that the Wilcoxon test tests for (and
> the same is
> > true for other two-sample rank tests, eg the logrank test).
> >
> > I know Frank knows this, because I gave a talk on it at Vanderbilt,
> > but most people don't know it. (I thought for a long time that the
> > Wilcoxon rank-sum test was a test for the median pairwise
> mean, which
> > is actually the R-estimator corresponding to the
> *one*-sample Wilcoxon test).
> >
> >
> > -thomas
> >
>
> Thanks for your note Thomas. I do feel that the problems you
> have rightly listed occur infrequently and that often I only
> care about two groups. Rank tests generally are good at
> relatives, not absolutes. We have an efficient test
> (Wilcoxon) for relative shift but for estimating an absolute
> one-sample quantity (e.g., median) the nonparametric
> estimator is not very efficient. Ironically there is an
> exact nonparametric confidence interval for the median
> (unrelated to Wilcoxon) but none exists for the mean.
>
> Cheers,
> Frank
> --
> Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine
> Department of Biostatistics
> Vanderbilt University
>
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