# T-Test Essentials: Definition, Formula and Calculation

## How To Do Two-Sample T-test in R

This article describes how to do a two-sample t-test in R (or in Rstudio). Note the two-sample t-test is also referred as:

• independent t-test,
• independent samples t-test,
• unpaired t-test or
• unrelated t-test.

The independent samples t-test comes in two different forms:

• the standard Student’s t-test, which assumes that the variance of the two groups are equal.
• the Welch’s t-test, which is less restrictive compared to the original Student’s test. This is the test where you do not assume that the variance is the same in the two groups, which results in the fractional degrees of freedom.

The two methods give very similar results unless both the group sizes and the standard deviations are very different.

You will learn how to:

• Perform the independent t-test in R using the following functions :
• t_test() [rstatix package]: the result is a data frame for easy plotting using the ggpubr package.
• t.test() [stats package]: R base function.
• Interpret and report the two-sample t-test
• Add p-values and significance levels to a plot
• Calculate and report the independent samples t-test effect size using Cohen’s d. The d statistic redefines the difference in means as the number of standard deviations that separates those means. T-test conventional effect sizes, proposed by Cohen, are: 0.2 (small effect), 0.5 (moderate effect) and 0.8 (large effect) (Cohen 1998).

Contents:

#### Related Book

Practical Statistics in R II - Comparing Groups: Numerical Variables

## Prerequisites

Make sure you have installed the following R packages:

• tidyverse for data manipulation and visualization
• ggpubr for creating easily publication ready plots
• rstatix provides pipe-friendly R functions for easy statistical analyses.
• datarium: contains required data sets for this chapter.

library(tidyverse)
library(ggpubr)
library(rstatix)

## Demo data

Demo dataset: genderweight [in datarium package] containing the weight of 40 individuals (20 women and 20 men).

Load the data and show some random rows by groups:

data("genderweight", package = "datarium")
# Show a sample of the data by group
set.seed(123)
genderweight %>% sample_n_by(group, size = 2)
## # A tibble: 4 x 3
##   id    group weight
##   <fct> <fct>  <dbl>
## 1 6     F       65.0
## 2 15    F       65.9
## 3 29    M       88.9
## 4 37    M       77.0

We want to know, whether the average weights are different between groups.

## Summary statistics

Compute some summary statistics by groups: mean and sd (standard deviation)

genderweight %>%
group_by(group) %>%
get_summary_stats(weight, type = "mean_sd")
## # A tibble: 2 x 5
##   group variable     n  mean    sd
##   <fct> <chr>    <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 F     weight      20  63.5  2.03
## 2 M     weight      20  85.8  4.35

## Calculation

Recall that, by default, R computes the Welch t-test, which is the safer one. This is the test where you do not assume that the variance is the same in the two groups, which results in the fractional degrees of freedom. If you want to assume the equality of variances (Student t-test), specify the option var.equal = TRUE.

### Using the R base function

There are two options for computing the independent t-test depending whether the two groups data are saved either in two different vectors or in a data frame.

Option 1. The data are saved in two different numeric vectors:

# Save the data in two different vector
women_weight <- genderweight %>%
filter(group == "F") %>%
pull(weight)
men_weight <- genderweight %>%
filter(group == "M") %>%
pull(weight)
# Compute t-test
res <- t.test(women_weight, men_weight)
res
##
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
##
## data:  women_weight and men_weight
## t = -20, df = 30, p-value <2e-16
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -24.5 -20.1
## sample estimates:
## mean of x mean of y
##      63.5      85.8

Option 2. The data are saved in a data frame.

# Compute t-test
res <- t.test(weight ~ group, data = genderweight)
res
##
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
##
## data:  weight by group
## t = -20, df = 30, p-value <2e-16
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -24.5 -20.1
## sample estimates:
## mean in group F mean in group M
##            63.5            85.8

As you can see, the two methods give the same results.

In the result above :

• t is the t-test statistic value (t = -20.79),
• df is the degrees of freedom (df= 26.872),
• p-value is the significance level of the t-test (p-value = 4.29810^{-18}).
• conf.int is the confidence interval of the means difference at 95% (conf.int = [-24.5314, -20.1235]);
• sample estimates is the mean value of the sample (mean = 63.499, 85.826).

### Using the rstatix package

We’ll use the pipe-friendly t_test() function [rstatix package], a wrapper around the R base function t.test(). The results can be easily added to a plot using the ggpubr R package.

stat.test <- genderweight %>%
t_test(weight ~ group) %>%
stat.test
## # A tibble: 1 x 9
##   .y.    group1 group2    n1    n2 statistic    df        p p.signif
##   <chr>  <chr>  <chr>  <int> <int>     <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl> <chr>
## 1 weight F      M         20    20     -20.8  26.9 4.30e-18 ****

If you want to assume the equality of variances (Student t-test), specify the option var.equal = TRUE:

stat.test2 <- genderweight %>%
t_test(weight ~ group, var.equal = TRUE) %>%
stat.test2

The results above show the following components:

• .y.: the y variable used in the test.
• group1,group2: the compared groups in the pairwise tests.
• statistic: Test statistic used to compute the p-value.
• df: degrees of freedom.
• p: p-value.

Note that, you can obtain a detailed result by specifying the option detailed = TRUE.

genderweight %>%
t_test(weight ~ group, detailed = TRUE) %>%
## # A tibble: 1 x 16
##   estimate estimate1 estimate2 .y.    group1 group2    n1    n2 statistic        p    df conf.low conf.high method alternative p.signif
##      <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl> <chr>  <chr>  <chr>  <int> <int>     <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl>     <dbl> <chr>  <chr>       <chr>
## 1    -22.3      63.5      85.8 weight F      M         20    20     -20.8 4.30e-18  26.9    -24.5     -20.1 T-test two.sided   ****

## Interpretation

The p-value of the test is 4.310^{-18}, which is less than the significance level alpha = 0.05. We can conclude that men’s average weight is significantly different from women’s average weight with a p-value = 4.310^{-18}.

## Effect size

### Cohen’s d for Student t-test

There are multiple version of Cohen’s d for Student t-test. The most commonly used version of the Student t-test effect size, comparing two groups ($A$ and $B$), is calculated by dividing the mean difference between the groups by the pooled standard deviation.

Cohen’s d formula:

$d = \frac{m_A - m_B}{SD_{pooled}}$

where,

• $m_A$ and $m_B$ represent the mean value of the group A and B, respectively.
• $n_A$ and $n_B$ represent the sizes of the group A and B, respectively.
• $SD_{pooled}$ is an estimator of the pooled standard deviation of the two groups. It can be calculated as follow :
$SD_{pooled} = \sqrt{\frac{\sum{(x-m_A)^2}+\sum{(x-m_B)^2}}{n_A+n_B-2}}$

Calculation. If the option var.equal = TRUE, then the pooled SD is used when compting the Cohen’s d.

genderweight %>%  cohens_d(weight ~ group, var.equal = TRUE)
## # A tibble: 1 x 7
##   .y.    group1 group2 effsize    n1    n2 magnitude
## * <chr>  <chr>  <chr>    <dbl> <int> <int> <ord>
## 1 weight F      M        -6.57    20    20 large

There is a large effect size, d = 6.57.

Note that, for small sample size (< 50), the Cohen’s d tends to over-inflate results. There exists a Hedge’s Corrected version of the Cohen’s d (Hedges and Olkin 1985), which reduces effect sizes for small samples by a few percentage points. The correction is introduced by multiplying the usual value of d by (N-3)/(N-2.25) (for unpaired t-test) and by (n1-2)/(n1-1.25) for paired t-test; where N is the total size of the two groups being compared (N = n1 + n2).

### Cohen’s d for Welch t-test

The Welch test is a variant of t-test used when the equality of variance can’t be assumed. The effect size can be computed by dividing the mean difference between the groups by the “averaged” standard deviation.

Cohen’s d formula:

$d = \frac{m_A - m_B}{\sqrt{(Var_1 + Var_2)/2}}$

where,

• $m_A$ and $m_B$ represent the mean value of the group A and B, respectively.
• $Var_1$ and $Var_2$ are the variance of the two groups.

Calculation:

genderweight %>% cohens_d(weight ~ group, var.equal = FALSE)
## # A tibble: 1 x 7
##   .y.    group1 group2 effsize    n1    n2 magnitude
## * <chr>  <chr>  <chr>    <dbl> <int> <int> <ord>
## 1 weight F      M        -6.57    20    20 large

Note that, when group sizes are equal and group variances are homogeneous, Cohen’s d for the standard Student and Welch t-tests are identical.

## Report

We could report the result as follow:

The mean weight in female group was 63.5 (SD = 2.03), whereas the mean in male group was 85.8 (SD = 4.3). A Welch two-samples t-test showed that the difference was statistically significant, t(26.9) = -20.8, p < 0.0001, d = 6.57; where, t(26.9) is shorthand notation for a Welch t-statistic that has 26.9 degrees of freedom.

Visualize the results:

# Create a box-plot
bxp <- ggboxplot(
genderweight, x = "group", y = "weight",
ylab = "Weight", xlab = "Groups", add = "jitter"
)

# Add p-value and significance levels
stat.test <- stat.test %>% add_xy_position(x = "group")
bxp +
stat_pvalue_manual(stat.test, tip.length = 0) +
labs(subtitle = get_test_label(stat.test, detailed = TRUE))

## Summary

This article shows how to perform the two-sample t-test in R/Rstudio using two different ways: the R base function t.test() and the t_test() function in the rstatix package. We also describe how to interpret and report the t-test results.

## References

Cohen, J. 1998. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hedges, Larry, and Ingram Olkin. 1985. “Statistical Methods in Meta-Analysis.” In Stat Med. Vol. 20. doi:10.2307/1164953.

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