Glossary


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H

Habitat

The natural environment where an organism or population of organisms live. However it may also refer to the natural environment and the organism populations (community) that live in it. In this sense it is almost the same as the term biotope. The marine coastal habitat, the forest, the mountain and the prairie, are examples of habitats.

Hypothesis testing

the use of statistics to assess whether sample data is consistent to a given hypothesis.

The usual process of hypothesis testing consists of the following steps:

Formulate the null hypotheses (H0) and the alternative hypothesis (H1)

Identify a statistical test that can be used to assess the truth of the null hypothesis

Compute the probability value that means the chance of the null hypothesis being true. The smaller the probability (p-value) is, the stronger the evidence against the null hypothesis.

Compare the p-value to an acceptable significance value (a value). If p ≤ a, the null hypothesis is rejected and the alternative hypothesis is accepted.