T-Test Condition of Independence
A researcher plans to use a two-sample t-test to compare the mean monthly accident rates of two departments. The data were collected over consecutive months, and the observations from one department are suspected to have autocorrelation. Which condition for inference is primarily violated by this issue?
They averaged the accident numbers over months incorrectly, thereby distorting the standard deviation.
They mistakenly used a paired t-test for independent departmental data.
They assumed that a larger sample size ensures independence, regardless of time-series effects.
They failed to account for the lack of independence due to autocorrelation in the sequential monthly data, which violates a key assumption of the two-sample t-test.
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