title: Four improved statistics for contrasting means by correcting skewness and kurtosis.
abstract: This paper is concerned with removing the influence of non-normality in the classical t-statistic for contrasting means. Using higher-order expansion to quantify the effect of non-normality, four corrected statistics are provided. Two aim to correct the mean bias and two to correct the overall distribution. The classical t-statistic is also robust against non-normality when the observed variables satisfy certain structures. A special case is when the marginal distributions of the contrast are independent and identically distributed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Systems and Management, Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Hirokazu
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yanagihara
authors.forename: Ke-Hai
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Yuan
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009010:Monte Carlo Method