Solved – Interpreting a Tukey – Kramer Confidence Interval Plot

confidence intervalinterpretationtukey-hsd-test

In order to see if any statistically significant differences in the means of 4 particular diets exist, a post-hoc test is conducted i.e. Tukey – Kramer.

Could someone please explain to me the plot which is attached below?

Note: Tukey – Kramer is being used here as there is not equal observations between diets.

image

Best Answer

There are 4 diets - which gives 6 possible pairwise comparisons between them: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, and 3-4 (2-1 would be the same as 1-2, so we don't count it twice).

The plot has all these comparisons displayed at different heights with the label on the left y axis side.

The x-axis represent the mean differences that were found between those pairs. So for example the comparison 2-1 had a mean difference of 20.

The extended lines show the 95% confidence intervals. In this case if the confidence interval crosses the 0 point - the difference would not be statistically significant. In the plot colors seem to indicate this significance: red lines do not cross the 0 so the differences in their means were found to be statistically significant.

Based on this we could reason that diet No. 1 was different from the rest as all the pairwise comparisons that included diet 1 were statistically significant (red in the plot) while all the other comparisons were not.