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Python for Data 26: ANOVA

In lesson 24 we introduced the t-test for checking whether the means of two groups differ. The t-test works well when dealing with two groups, but sometimes we want to compare more than two groups at the same time. For example, if we wanted to test whether voter age differs based on some categorical variable like race, we have to compare the means of each level or group the variable. We could carry out a separate t-test for each pair of groups, but when you conduct many tests you increase the chances of false positives. The analysis of variance or ANOVA is a statistical inference test that lets you compare multiple groups at the same time.

One-Way ANOVA

The one-way ANOVA tests whether the mean of some numeric variable differs across the levels of one categorical variable. It essentially answers the question: do any of the group means differ from one another? We won't get into the details of carrying out an ANOVA by hand as it involves more calculations than the t-test, but the process is similar: you go through several calculations to arrive at a test statistic and then you compare the test statistic to a critical value based on a probability distribution. In the case of the ANOVA, you use the "f-distribution".

The scipy library has a function for carrying out one-way ANOVA tests called scipy.stats.f_oneway(). Let's generate some fake voter age and demographic data and use the ANOVA to compare average ages across the groups:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import scipy.stats as stats