Paired t-test

Paired t-test in SAS

The Paired t-test is used when two samples are naturally correlated. In the Paired t-test, the difference of the means between the two samples is compared to a given number that represents the null hypothesis. For a Paired t-test, the number of observations in each sample must be equal.

In SAS, a Paired t-test is typically performed using PROC TTEST.

Normal Data

By default, SAS PROC TTEST t-test assumes normality in the data and uses a classic Student’s t-test.

Data Used

The following data was used in this example.

  data pressure;
     input SBPbefore SBPafter @@;
     datalines;
  120 128   124 131   130 131   118 127
  140 132   128 125   140 141   135 137
  126 118   130 132   126 129   127 135
  ;

Code

The following code was used to test the comparison of two paired samples of Systolic Blood Pressure before and after a procedure.

  proc ttest data=pressure;
     paired SBPbefore*SBPafter;
  run;

Output:

Lognormal Data

The SAS paired t-test also supports analysis of lognormal data. Here is the data used for the lognormal analysis.

Data

  data auc;
     input TestAUC RefAUC @@;
     datalines;
  103.4 90.11  59.92 77.71  68.17 77.71  94.54 97.51
  69.48 58.21  72.17 101.3  74.37 79.84  84.44 96.06
  96.74 89.30  94.26 97.22  48.52 61.62  95.68 85.80
  ;

Code

For cases when the data is lognormal, SAS offers the “DIST” option to chose between a normal and lognormal distribution. The procedure also offers the TOST option to specify the equivalence bounds.

  proc ttest data=auc dist=lognormal tost(0.8, 1.25);
     paired TestAUC*RefAUC;
  run;

Output:

As can be seen in the figure above, the lognormal variation of the TTEST procedure offers additional results for geometric mean, coefficient of variation, and TOST equivalence analysis. The output also includes multiple p-values.