TABLES

Statistical Tables — z, t, Chi-Square and F

The four distribution tables from the back of a statistics textbook, on the web. Each comes with instructions and a worked example.

Table or calculator?

Tables are handy for looking up critical values at standard significance levels. If you only need α = 0.05 or 0.01, as in exam problems, a table is enough.

If you need an exact p-value, or degrees of freedom that are not in the table (such as the fractional df of a Welch t-test), use a calculator instead. The t-test, chi-square and normal calculators on this site use the same algorithms as these tables and work for any value.

Accuracy

The table values are computed with numerical algorithms based on the incomplete beta and gamma functions and then rounded. They may differ from a printed textbook table by one unit in the last digit because of rounding.

Which table?

  • z table: cumulative probabilities of normally distributed values; tests and intervals when the population SD is known
  • t table: tests and confidence intervals for a mean with small samples and unknown population SD
  • Chi-square table: goodness-of-fit and independence tests for categorical data; confidence intervals for a variance
  • F table: ANOVA, comparing two variances, testing a regression model