Description

Page’s test evaluates the hypothesis that X1X2X3 ≥ ... ≥ Xn (descending trend) or X1X2X3 ≤ ... ≤ Xn (ascending trend) against the null hypothesis that X1 = X2 = X3 = ... = Xn (no trend). The a-priori hypothesis for the directionality of the trend must be specified (by default the program assumes a descending trend).

The program takes a matrix, with treatments along the columns and replications along the rows, and returns Page’s (1963) L statistic, along with its p-value.

The program calculates the exact p-value using Equation 4 in Page (1963, p. 224). For small values of m and n, the program can optionally use the critical values of L given in Page (1963) to calculate the p-value.

Although the test is commonly referred to as a trend test, it does not strictly test for a trend across the entire dataset. Rather, the test will return a significant result if at least one data point goes up (or down in the case of a descending hypothesis) in each replication.

Requirements

Scipy – http://scipy.org

Parameters

Return values

Usage example

Import the module:

import Page

Input your data in the form of a matrix (represented in Python as a list of lists). Treatments go along the columns and replications go down the rows.

data = [[100,90,105,70,5], [200,150,80,50,10], [121,130,75,20,25], [90,75,76,54,32]]

Run Page’s test on your data:

Page.Test(data)
(214.0, 4, 5, 0.00033692926567685522)

The result is a 4-tuple (l, m, n, p), where l = Page’s L statistic, m = number of replications, n = number of treatments, and p is the p-value.

If you hypothesize an ascending trend (rather than descending), set the ascending argument to True:

Page.Test(data, ascending=True)
(146.0, 4, 5, 'n.s.')

If you want to use Page’s critical values (rather than calculate an exact p-value) set the use_critical_values argument to True:

Page.Test(data, use_critical_values=True)
(214.0, 4, 5, '< 0.001')

License

MantelTest is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

References

Page, E. B. (1963). Ordered hypotheses for multiple treatments: A significance test for linear ranks. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58, 216–230. doi:10.2307/2282965

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page's_trend_test