The sign test, first introduced by John Arbuthnot in 1710, is a nonparametric test that can be applied in a variety of situations such as the following:

When the data have two possible outcomes, it can be used to test whether these two outcomes have equal probabilities. In this situation, the sign test can be regarded as a special case of the binomial test.

It can be used when the variable of interest is ordinal, interval, or ratio, and one wants to test whether the median of this variable is some given value.

It can be used in paired data analysis where there are two categorical variables and one continuous or ordinal variable. One of the categorical variables has only two values, such as “before treatment” and “after ...

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