Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Bayesian Two-Sample T-Test, Mithat Gonen, Wesley O. Johnson, Yonggang Lu, Peter H. Westfall

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dept. of Epidemiology & Biostatistics Working Paper Series

In this article we show how the pooled-variance two-sample t-statistic arises from a Bayesian formulation of the two-sided point null testing problem, with emphasis on teaching. We identify a reasonable and useful prior giving a closed-form Bayes factor that can be written in terms of the distribution of the two-sample t-statistic under the null and alternative hypotheses respectively. This provides a Bayesian motivation for the two-sample t-statistic, which has heretofore been buried as a special case of more complex linear models, or given only roughly via analytic or Monte Carlo approximations. The resulting formulation of the Bayesian test is easy …