An airline wants to select a computer software package for its reservation system. Four software packages (1, 2, 3, and 4) are commercially available. An experiment is set up in which each package is used to make reservations for 5 randomly selected weeks and data on the number of passengers that are bumped over a month are collected. (A total of 20 weeks was included in the experiment.) The variability of the number of passengers that are bumped is found to be roughly the same for the 4 packages. The distribution on the number of passengers that are bumped has been found out to be right-skewed for package 1 and 4, left-skewed for package 2 and normal for package 3. Which of the following tests will be the most appropriate to find out if the average number of passengers being bumped over a month is the same across the 4 packages?
A) paired t test
B) pooled-variance t test
C) one-way ANOVA F test for differences among more than two means
D) Kruskal-Wallis rank test

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The One-way ANOVA F test is appropriate for testing if there are significant differences among the means of more than two groups, which is the case here with four software packages. The Kruskal-Wallis rank test is for non-parametric data and is not appropriate since the data on the number of passengers bumped is not stated to be ranked data. The paired t-test is used for comparing two dependent samples, which is not the case here where the 5 weeks used for each package are independent. The pooled-variance t-test is used for comparing the means of two independent groups with equal variances, which is not the case here where there are four groups.

An Airline Wants to Select a Computer Software Package for Its