Directional-sum test for nonparametric Behrens-Fisher problem with applications to the dietary intervention trial

Abstract

For a nonparametric Behrens-Fisher problem, a directional-sum test is proposed based on division-combination strategy. A one-layer wild bootstrap procedure is given to calculate its statistical significance. We conduct simulation studies with data generated from lognormal, t and Laplace distributions to show that the proposed test can control the type I error rates properly and is more powerful than the existing rank-sum and maximum-type tests under most of the considered scenarios. Applications to the dietary intervention trial further show the performance of the proposed test.