Section author: Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft

Bayesian t-tests

An important type of statistical inference problem discussed in this book is the comparison between two means, discussed in some detail in the chapter on t-tests (chapter Comparing two means). If you can remember back that far, you’ll recall that there are several versions of the t-test. I’ll talk a little about Bayesian versions of the independent samples t-tests and the paired samples t-test in this section.

Independent samples t-test

The most common type of t-test is the independent samples t-test, and it arises when you have data as in the harpo data set that we used in the earlier chapter on t-tests (chapter Comparing two means). In this data set, we have two groups of students, those who received lessons from Anastasia and those who took their classes with Bernadette. The question we want to answer is whether there’s any difference in the grades received by these two groups of students. Back in that chapter, I suggested you could analyse this kind of data using the Independent Samples t-test in jamovi, which gave us the results in Fig. 201. As we obtain a p-value less than 0.05, we reject the null hypothesis.

Fig. 201 Independent Samples T-Test result in jamovi

What does the Bayesian version of the t-test look like? We can get the Bayes factor by selecting the Bayes Factor checkbox under the Tests option, and accepting the suggested default value for the Prior. This gives the results shown in the table in Fig. 202. What we get in this table is a Bayes factor statistic of 1.75, meaning that the evidence provided by these data are about 1.8:1 in favour of the alternative hypothesis.

Fig. 202 Bayes Factor analysis alongside Independent Samples T-Test

Before moving on, it’s worth highlighting the difference between the orthodox test results and the Bayesian one. According to the orthodox test, we obtained a significant result, though only barely. Nevertheless, many people would happily accept p = 0.043 as reasonably strong evidence for an effect. In contrast, notice that the Bayesian test doesn’t even reach 2:1 odds in favour of an effect, and would be considered very weak evidence at best. In my experience that’s a pretty typical outcome. Bayesian methods usually require more evidence before rejecting the null.

Paired samples t-test

Back in section The paired-samples t-test I discussed the chico data set in which student grades were measured on two tests, and we were interested in finding out whether grades went up from test 1 to test 2. Because every student did both tests, the tool we used to analyse the data was a paired samples t-test. Fig. 203 shows the jamovi results table for the conventional Paired Samples T-Test alongside the Bayes Factor analysis. At this point, I hope you can read this output without any difficulty. The data provide evidence of about 6000:1 in favour of the alternative. We could probably reject the null with some confidence!

Fig. 203 Paired Samples T-Test and Bayes Factor result in jamovi