Polynesian Triangle Quick Assessment
Map of Polynesian Triangle & High Seas
The Polynesian Triangle (Wikipedia) is a region of the Pacific Ocean with three island groups at its corners:
- Hawai‘i
- Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and
- New Zealand (Aotearoa).
Overview
This table describes overall results ordered by category, is_significant (p-value from Welch’s t-test dif_pval < 0.05), and dif_avg_sd. The dif_avg_sd represents the difference between averages (\(\mu_{polynesia}\) - \(\mu_{other}\)) divided by the standard deviation (\(sd_{other}\)), so the magnitude of the difference between inside the Polynesian Triangle and outside it.
In order to answer the question, are the averages between Global and Polynesian Triangle significantly different (i.e. reject the null hypothesis that the mean value is shared between the two sets of values), I used a Welchs’ t-test, which does not assume equal variance between groups but does assume normal distribution. There are some other approaches to solving this.
Figure 1 from Preliminary Testing: The devil of statistics? describing a more thorough approach.
Broad Layers
Taxa Layers
