Copyright © 2012 Gerhard Marinell et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In a classic significance test, based on a random sample with size , a value will be calculated at size aiming to reject the null hypothesis. The sample size , however, can retrospectively be divided into partial samples and a test of significance can be calculated for each partial sample. As a result, several partial samples will provide significant values whereas others will not show significant values. In this paper, we propose a significance test that takes into account the additional information from the values of the partial samples of a random sample. We show that the    values can greatly modify the results of a classic significance test.