Hypothesis Testing

Establishing and evaluating research hypotheses

Beatrice Taylor - beatrice.taylor@ucl.ac.uk

8th October 2025

Last week

Overview of lecture 2

Continued concepts from exploratory data analysis, in particular probability distributions.

  • Representative data
  • Normal distribution
  • Binomial distribution
  • Poisson distribution
  • Exponentials
  • Logarithms

This week

Motivation

How do we understand how likely events are to occur?

Question

What is the probability of someone at UCL being over 190cm?

Answer

Try to understand the distribution of heights.

The scientific method

The scientific method

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lecture you should be able to:

  1. Establish a hypothesis for a given research project.
  2. Define the Type I and Type II errors.
  3. Evaluate a hypothesis using appropriate statistical tests.