1. Introduction
The F-test for two counts obtained from the Poisson distribution has been applied for the testing of the hypothesis that two counts differ significantly vs. the alternative hypothesis that there are two counts that do not differ significantly. The F-test for two counts is used to test whether the two counts exposed to different conditions (respectively) are significantly different (see Kanji [
1]). The F-test works when the sample is obtained under the same conditions. This type of test is applied for testing the occurrence of counts in a fixed time and when the time interval is different. The details of the F-test when the counts are obtained from the Poisson distribution can be found in Kanji [
1]. A powerful test for comparing the means of the Poisson distribution was presented by Krishnamoorthy and Thomson [
2]. The application of the count data in the field of education was studied by Hilbe [
3]. The application and goodness-of-fit test were studied by Puig and Weiß [
4]. Various applications of this kind of test can be seen in [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10].
Weather and wind forecasting and estimation are conducted using statistical models. The statistical tests are applied for testing the significance of the models used in the estimation and forecasting of wind speed. For the applications of statistical techniques and methods, the reader may refer to [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20].
The F-test for two counts under classical statistics is usually applied when counts from the Poisson distribution are sure, certain, and determinate. Viertl [
21] stated that “statistical data are frequently not precise numbers but more or less non-precise, also called fuzzy. Measurements of continuous variables are always fuzzy to a certain degree”. When the count data are recorded in an interval such as the minimum count and the maximum count, the F-test for two counts cannot be applied. In such a situation, the statistical test designed under fuzzy logic can be applied. The application of statistical tests under fuzzy logic can be seen in [
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29].
The idea of neutrosophic logic was introduced by Smarandache [
30]. The efficiency of neutrosophic logic can be found in Smarandache [
31]. Some applications of the neutrosophic logic were described in [
32,
33,
34,
35,
36]. Neutrosophic statistics with applications were discussed by Smarandache [
37]. The statistical methods to deal with neutrosophic numbers were discussed by Chen et al. [
38,
39]. Aslam [
40] introduced the F-test to perform an analysis of the variance test. Various neutrosophic tests with applications can be seen in [
41,
42].
Generally, the F-test under classical statistics is applied for testing the equality of variance of two population variances. The existing F-test for two counts (Poisson distribution) is applied when counts are determined or all parameters involved are certain. The F-test under classical statistics cannot be utilized when counts are recorded in an interval. According to the literature, to the best of the author’s knowledge, no F-test for two counts (Poisson distribution) can be found when counts are recorded in the interval. The main focus of the paper was to develop the F-test under neutrosophic statistics when two counts are modeled from a Poisson distribution. Data from the weather department are applied for the illustration of the proposed F-test for counts. It is expected that the proposed F-test for counts is more efficient than the existing F-test for counts under classical statistics.
2. Methods
Kanji [
1] reported the F-test when two counts follow a Poisson distribution. Kanji [
1] presented the statistical test when counts are obtained in a fixed time and obtained over different time intervals. Mathematical proofs of the F-test for two counts when the number of events occurring in a fixed time and different periods of time are shown in the
Appendix A (Theorems A1 and A2). Let us assume that
and
are two neutrosophic counts consisting of determinate and indeterminate parts. For the measure of
and
indeterminacy in counts, see [
43,
44,
45,
46,
47,
48,
49].
Theorem 1. The statistic in neutrosophic form when counts are obtained in the same period of time is given as Proof. The basic operation on neutrosophic numbers can be performed as described below.
Let
and for
be neutrosophic numbers obtained from the neutrosophic F-distribution (see [
37]). According to [
38], the following operation can be performed on the neutrosophic numbers:
or
Suppose that is the lower value, is the upper value of the neutrosophic form, and is the measure of indeterminacy.
According to [
1,
37,
38] and Theorems A1 and A2, we have
i.e.,
Note that and are the lower and upper counts of the first population, respectively, and and are the lower and upper counts of the second population, respectively.
Using the basic operation, the neutrosophic form of
can be written as
or
where
presents the neutrosophic F-distribution
degree of freedom. □
Theorem 2. To test the null hypothesis that, the F-test, say , is given as .
Proof. Let and be count in intervals for the first and the second populations, respectively. Let and be the neutrosophic forms of these counts, where and are the measures of indeterminacy for counts in population 1 and population 2, respectively. By following Theorems A1 and A2, we can proceed as described below.
From [
1], the F-test for classical statistics is given by
The F-test, say
, under neutrosophic statistics is given by
The F-test under indeterminacy is expressed as
□
Suppose that the first population mean is
and the second population mean is
. To test the null hypothesis that
, the F-test, say
, based on neutrosophic counts
and
is defined as
The statistic
is modeled by a neutrosophic F-distribution with
degrees of freedom (see Aslam [
50]). The statistic
in neutrosophic form can be expressed as
The proposed statistic is a generalization of the existing F-test for two counts of data. The statistic presents the existing F-test for two counts of data. Note that presents the indeterminate part, and is a measure of uncertainty associated with . The proposed statistic becomes the existing statistic when.
Theorem 3. The proposed statistic in neutrosophic form over the different periods of timeandis given as Proof. Let and be different times with counting rates and , respectively. Suppose that is the lower value, is the upper value of the neutrosophic form, and is the measure of indeterminacy.
According to [
1,
37] and Theorems 1 and 2, we have
and
i.e.,
Note that and are the lower and upper counts of the first population, respectively, and and are the lower and upper counts of the second population, respectively.
Using the basic operation, the neutrosophic form of
can be written as
or
where
presents the neutrosophic F-distribution with
degrees of freedom. □
Theorem 4. The statistic over different periods of timeandand counting ratesandis given by Proof. According to [
1] and Theorems A1 and A2, the F-test for classical statistics is given by
The F-test, say
, under neutrosophic statistics is given by
The F-test under indeterminacy is expressed as
when two counts are observed over diverse periods of time
and
, with the counting rates
and
. The proposed statistic
is defined as
The proposed statistic
in neutrosophic form can be expressed as
□
The existing F-test is a special case of the proposed statistic . The statistic presents the existing F-test for two counts of data. Note that presents the indeterminate part and is a measure of the uncertainty associated with . The proposed statistic becomes the existing statistic when .
3. Application
The US daily and monthly weather recorded data which broke records are used to show the application of the proposed F-test. The daily or monthly records are noted in intervals rather than the exact number. The record weather data follow a Poisson distribution as these are count data; the events are independent, the average rate of record broken data during the specified time can be calculated, and two records are assumed to be not noted in the same time period. The low minimum, low maximum, high minimum, and high maximum data for daily and monthly records were accessed on 7 January 2021, through
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records. The daily record and monthly record data are presented in
Table 1 and
Table 2, respectively (see Aslam [
50]). The weather data in intervals can be adequately analyzed using the proposed F-test as compared to the F-test under classical statistics.
Table 1 and
Table 2 indicate that the record-breaking data were recorded for the same time periods (daily records/monthly records); therefore, the statistic
can be suitably applied when
. In
Table 1 and
Table 2, the values of
are also shown. The proposed test for the daily records (last 30 days) was implemented according to the following steps:
- Step-1
State vs. .
- Step-2
Let
= 5% and the corresponding critical value at
be 1 using the F-table from Kanji [
1].
- Step-3
For the last 30 days, the values of are calculated as .
- Step-4
Accept as .
The computed value of falls in the acceptance region, which leads to acceptance of the null hypothesis with the conclusion that there is no significant difference between the two counts for less than 30 days. Similarly, the other results for US daily and monthly records can be interpreted.
4. Comparative Study
A statistical test based on neutrosophic statistics has an edge over the statistical test based on classical statistics. Therefore, in this section, a comparison of the proposed F-test with the existing F-test is presented. The proposed F-test consists of two parts known as the determinate and indeterminate parts, with the latter having the measure of indeterminacy. The proposed F-test is reduced to the existing F-test when record data are measured as exact values. The neutrosophic analysis for the last 30 days and the last 365 days is shown in
Table 3 (see Aslam [
50]).
For example, the neutrosophic form of the statistic for the records of the last 365 days (US daily record) is expressed as . This neutrosophic form has two parts. The first part 0.4421 denotes the values of statistics under classical statistics. The second value denotes the indeterminate part, and = 0.2611 is the measure of indeterminacy associated with the test. Note here that the proposed F-test is reduced to the F-test under classical statistics when = 0. From the analysis, it can be noted that the proposed F-test provides the values of the test statistic in the interval from 0.4221 to 0.5713 rather than the exact value. From this study, it is clear that the existing F-test gives the determinate value of the statistics while the proposed F-test for two counts from the Poisson distribution gives the values in the interval, in addition to information about the measure of indeterminacy.
Another advantage of the proposed test over the existing F-test is that, when
= 5%, the probability of rejecting
when it is true is 0.05, the probability of accepting
is 0.95, and the measure of uncertainty/indeterminacy associated with the test is 0.2611. This is the case of paraconsistent probability where the total probability (0.05 + 0.95 + 0.2611 = 1.2611) lies in intervals from 1 and 3 (see Smarandache [
37]). For the proposed test, the total probability associated with the test can be greater than 1; however, for the existing test, the total probability associated with the test is always equal to 1. Therefore, the proposed test is more informative than the existing F-test in terms of the probability associated with the test.
5. Power of the Test
In this section, we compare the performance of the proposed test with the existing F-test for counts in terms of the power of the test by following Aslam [
51]. Suppose that
and
are the type-I error (the chance of rejecting
when it is true) and type-II error (the probability of accepting
when it is false), respectively. Let
be the power of the test. A simulation study was performed to calculate the power of the test for various values of
. The values of the power of the test of the proposed F-test for counts when
= 0.05 are shown in
Table 4. The values of the power of the test of the proposed F-test for counts when
= 0.01 are shown in
Table 5. The simulation process to calculate the power of the proposed test is explained as follows:
Generate 100 values of counting data at various values of .
Specify the values of
= 0.01 and
= 0.05 and select the corresponding table values using the F-table from Kanji [
1].
Compute the test statistic and record the number of values accepting and not accepting .
The power of the test can be computed from the ratio of values accepting to the total number of replications.
In
Table 4 and
Table 5 the first value when
presents the power of the test under classical statistics. From
Table 4 and
Table 5, it can be seen that, as the values of
increased, the values of the power of the test also increased. For example, from
Table 4, it can be noted that the value of the power of the test was [0.90, 0.90] when
and the value of the power of the test was [0.90, 0.97] when
. The curves of power of the proposed F-test for counts are shown in
Figure 1 and
Figure 2.
Figure 1 and
Figure 2 also show that as the values of
increased, the values of the power of the test also increased.