What is the Chi-Square test in statistics?

Rohan Paris
2 min readMay 6, 2022

The Chi-Square test (abbreviation: x²) is a non-parametric statistical test used to compare observed results with the expected results. A low value of X² means that there is a high correlation between the two sets of data.

Assumptions:

  1. Sample data is randomly picked from the population.
  2. The data categories are mutually exclusive.
  3. The data should be in the form of frequencies or counts and not in percentages.
  4. The observations should be independent of each other.

Formula:

The chi-squared test is done to check if there is any difference between the observed value and expected value. The formula for chi-square can be written as:

Chi-Square distribution table:

The Chi-Square distribution table is a table that shows the critical values of the Chi-Square distribution. To use the Chi-Square distribution table, you only need to know two values:

  • The degree of freedom for the Chi-Square test, which is calculated as df = number of categories - 1
  • Significance value α

The critical value can be found by using below distribution table (row = df, column = α)

Solved example:

Q) Is there a relationship between the placements of students and their CGPA considering a significance value of 0.05

H0: There is a relationship between the CGPA and the frequency of placed students.

H1: There is no relationship between the CGPA and the frequency of placed students.

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