Given two paired sets and of measured values, the paired -test determines whether they differ from each other in a significant way under the assumptions that the paired differences are independent and identically normally distributed.
To apply the test, let
(1)
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(2)
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then define by
(3)
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This statistic has degrees of freedom.
A table of Student's t-distribution confidence intervals can be used to determine the significance level at which two distributions differ.