Mann–Whitney U test

In statistics, the Mann–Whitney U test (also called the Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon (MWW), Wilcoxon rank-sum test, or Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test) is a nonparametric test of the null hypothesis that it is equally likely that a randomly selected value from one sample will be less than or greater than a randomly selected value from a second sample. In statistics, the Mann–Whitney U test (also called the Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon (MWW), Wilcoxon rank-sum test, or Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test) is a nonparametric test of the null hypothesis that it is equally likely that a randomly selected value from one sample will be less than or greater than a randomly selected value from a second sample. This test can be used to determine whether two independent samples were selected from populations having the same distribution; a similar nonparametric test used on dependent samples is the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Although Mann and Whitney developed the Mann–Whitney U test under the assumption of continuous responses with the alternative hypothesis being that one distribution is stochastically greater than the other, there are many other ways to formulate the null and alternative hypotheses such that the Mann–Whitney U test will give a valid test.