

What is a critical value?Ī critical value (or values) is a point on the support of an error distribution which bounds a critical region from above or below. For one-sided tests it will output both possible regions, whereas for a two-sided test it will output the union of the two critical regions on the opposite sides of the distribution. Should one want to claim anything about the direction of the effect, the corresponding null hypothesis is direction as well (one-sided hypothesis).ĭepending on the type of test - one-tailed or two-tailed, the calculator will output the critical value or values and the corresponding critical region.

Basically, it comes down to whether the inference is going to contain claims regarding the direction of the effect or not. For the F statistic there are two separate degrees of freedom - one for the numerator and one for the denominator.įinally, to determine a critical region, one needs to know whether they are testing a point null versus a composite alternative (on both sides) or a composite null versus (covering one side of the distribution) a composite alternative (covering the other). Then, for distributions other than the normal one (Z), you need to know the degrees of freedom.

F-distributed (Fisher-Snedecor distribution), usually used in analysis of variance (ANOVA).X 2-distributed ( Chi square distribution, often used in goodness-of-fit tests, but also for tests of homogeneity or independence).

