R: Test for Equal Means in a One-Way Layout

oneway.test {stats}

R Documentation

Test for Equal Means in a One-Way Layout

Description

Test whether two or more samples from normal distributions have the same means. The variances are not necessarily assumed to be equal.

Usage

oneway.test(formula, data, subset, na.action, var.equal = FALSE)

Arguments

`formula`	a formula of the form `lhs ~ rhs` where `lhs` gives the sample values and `rhs` the corresponding groups.
`data`	an optional matrix or data frame (or similar: see `model.frame`) containing the variables in the formula `formula`. By default the variables are taken from `environment(formula)`.
`subset`	an optional vector specifying a subset of observations to be used.
`na.action`	a function which indicates what should happen when the data contain `NA`s. Defaults to `getOption("na.action")`.
`var.equal`	a logical variable indicating whether to treat the variances in the samples as equal. If `TRUE`, then a simple F test for the equality of means in a one-way analysis of variance is performed. If `FALSE`, an approximate method of Welch (1951) is used, which generalizes the commonly known 2-sample Welch test to the case of arbitrarily many samples.

Value

A list with class "htest" containing the following components:

`statistic`	the value of the test statistic.
`parameter`	the degrees of freedom of the exact or approximate F distribution of the test statistic.
`p.value`	the p-value of the test.
`method`	a character string indicating the test performed.
`data.name`	a character string giving the names of the data.

References

B. L. Welch (1951), On the comparison of several mean values: an alternative approach. Biometrika, 38, 330–336.

Examples

## Not assuming equal variances
oneway.test(extra ~ group, data = sleep)
## Assuming equal variances
oneway.test(extra ~ group, data = sleep, var.equal = TRUE)
## which gives the same result as
anova(lm(extra ~ group, data = sleep))

[Package stats version 2.9.0 ]