How to find critical values and p-values from the t-distribution (in R)
Task
If we have a test statistic and need to find the corresponding p-value from the t-distribution, how do we do that? If we need to find a p-value from the t distribution, given that we know the significance level and degrees of freedom, how do we do that?
Related tasks:
Solution
If we choose a value $0 \le \alpha \le 1$ as our Type 1 error rate,
and we know the sample size of our data,
then we can find the critical value from the $t$-distribution using R’s
qt() function. The code below shows how to do this for left-tailed,
right-tailed, and two-tailed hypothesis tests.
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alpha <- 0.05 # Replace with your alpha value
n <- 68 # Replace with your sample size
qt(p = alpha, df = n-1, lower.tail = TRUE) # Critical value for a left-tailed test
qt(p = alpha, df = n-1, lower.tail = FALSE) # Critical value for a right-tailed test
qt(p = alpha/2, df = n-1, lower.tail = FALSE) # Critical value for a two-tailed test
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[1] -1.667916
[1] 1.667916
[1] 1.996008
We can also compute $p$-values from the $t$-distribution to compare to a test statistic. As an example, we’ll use a test statistic of 2.67, but you can substitute your test statistic’s value instead.
We can find the $p$-value for this test statistic using R’s pt() function.
We will use the same example sample size as above.
Again, we show code for left-tailed, right-tailed, and two-tailed tests.
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test_statistic <- 2.67 # Replace with your test statistic
n <- 68 # Replace with your sample size
pt(test_statistic, df = n-1, lower.tail = TRUE) # p-value for a left-tailed test
pt(test_statistic, df = n-1, lower.tail = FALSE) # p-value for a right-tailed test
2*pt(test_statistic, df = n-1, lower.tail = FALSE) # p-value for a two-tailed test
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[1] 0.9952455
[1] 0.004754548
[1] 0.009509096
Content last modified on 24 July 2023.
See a problem? Tell us or edit the source.
Contributed by Elizabeth Czarniak (CZARNIA_ELIZ@bentley.edu)