Multinomial Goodness of Fit
A population is called multinomial if its data is categorical and belongs to a collection of discrete non-overlapping classes.
The null hypothesis for goodness of fit test for multinomial distribution is that the observed frequency fi is equal to an expected count ei in each category. It is to be rejected if the p-value of the following Chi-squared test statistics is less than a given significance level α.
In the built-in data set survey, the Smoke column records the survey response about the student’s smoking habit. As there are exactly four proper response in the survey: "Heavy", "Regul" (regularly), "Occas" (occasionally) and "Never", the Smoke data is multinomial. It can be confirmed with the levels function in R.
As discussed in the tutorial Frequency Distribution of Qualitative Data, we can find the frequency distribution with the table function.
Suppose the campus smoking statistics is as below. Determine whether the sample data in survey supports it at .05 significance level.
We save the campus smoking statistics in a variable named smoke.prob. Then we apply the chisq.test function and perform the Chi-Squared test.
> chisq.test(smoke.freq, p=smoke.prob)
Chi-squared test for given probabilities
X-squared = 0.1074, df = 3, p-value = 0.991
As the p-value 0.991 is greater than the .05 significance level, we do not reject the null hypothesis that the sample data in survey supports the campus-wide smoking statistics.
Conduct the Chi-squared goodness of fit test for the smoking data by computing the p-value with the textbook formula.