$Critique my null and alternative hypothesis (beginner)$

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$Critique my null and alternative hypothesis (beginner)$

I'm new to writting these, so I want critique on if I'm doing them correctly and how I can write them better.

"You want to know if a drug works better than a placebo for it at increasing the number of the number of white blood cells."

$H_{0}$ = The population of white blood cells when given the drug is not significantly different to the population of white blood cells after taking the drug.

$H_{a}$ = The drug is statistically significantly better at increasing the number of white blood cells in the population.

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Faithalone

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It's not bad, but a there are a few issues.

1. There is a mismatch between "different than" in the null hypothesis and "greater than" in the alternative hypothesis. You want to make sure you're consistent about whether it's a two sided hypothesis ("different than") or a one sided hypothesis ("greater than" or "less than")

2. The alternative hypothesis shouldn't be about the effectiveness of the drug itself, it should be about a population parameter, namely the population mean of each group.

Here's what I would say:

$H_{0}: $ The population mean of the number of white blood cells in the treatment group and in the placebo group are the same.

$H_{a}: $ The population mean number of white blood cells in the treatment group is higher than in the placebo group.

Schwartstack

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$Critique my null and alternative hypothesis (beginner)$

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