3

Poisson test - multiple replicates against null (in R)

 2 years ago
source link: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/545430/poisson-test-multiple-replicates-against-null-in-r/545437#545437
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
multiple replicates against null (in R)

I feel like this should be a pretty basic question, but I can't find a clear answer.

I have multiple independent replicates of the same thing. Lets say I went and counted cars along a road between 8am and 9am, every Monday for a month. The assumption is those counts are all sampled from the same distribution. I counted 9, 10, 8, and 9 cars.

Let's further say the City Traffic Department publishes their modeled traffic rates. They think the road should have 10 cars per hour.

How do I test whether or not my counted observations match that prediction?

For any one count (e.g. a count of 9), it's trivial using R: poisson.test(x = 9, T = 1, r = 10)

But how do I use the repeated counts?

I did think I could take the average of the four counts. As this is a Poisson distribution, it is fully described by the mean alone. In this case the mean is 9, so the result would be the same as above.

But it seems wrong that repeating counts and increasing my sample size has no impact at all on the conclusion. Let's say the true mean is 5 cars per hour - I could count every morning all year, reach a mean of 5, and still the simple poisson test would conclude there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the mean is 10. Surely increasing my sample size increases power?


About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK