# Under what circumstances does Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon signed-rank test fail?

The advice must be modified somewhat when the distributions are both strongly skewed and very discrete, such as Likert scale items where most of the observations are in one of the end categories. Then the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney isn’t necessarily a better choice than the t-test.

I'm trying to use Mann-Whitney as a non-parametric alternative of t-test, when distributions are not normal. But it seems that there are cases in which even Mann-Whitney isn't necessarily a better choice than parametric method.

Under what circumstances does Mann-Whitney test fail, and what are the alternatives that I have in such cases?

Please explain in cases of both independent and dependent samples (Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon signed-rank)

• Not being a "better choice" is not tantamount to "failure." Statistical procedures are selected for their abilities to yield good decisions either on average or in the worst cases. The use of a procedure that is "not a better choice" can still be indicated from other considerations such as simplicity, interpretability, robustness, and so forth. – whuber Jul 7 at 13:16

Traditionally, these rank-based tests were not recommended for use when there are many ties. However, implementations of this test in some statistical software compute useful approximate P-values for data containing ties, often with a warning that these P-values are not exact.

Challenger Data. Data presented to a Presidential Commission to investigate the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, showed results of partial (non-catastrophic) O-ring failures on 24 previous shuttle launches at temperatures above and below 65 degrees Fahrenheit were as follows

cold:  1 1 1 3
warm:  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2


Permutation test: In their textbook Statistical Sleuth, Ramsey and Schafer report the exact P-value 0.00988 for a one-sided permutation test using the pooled t statistic as metric. (Pages 82 and 91.) This exact P-value can be computed by moderately tedious combinatorial methods.

A very good approximate P-value 0.01 is found by a simulation in R:

x = c(cold, warm); g = c(rep(1,4), rep(2,20))
t.obs = t.test(x ~ g, alt="g", var.eq=T)$$stat set.seed(707) t.prm = replicate(10^5, t.test(x ~ sample(g), alt="g", var.eq=T)$$stat)
mean(t.prm >= t.obs)
[1] 0.01009


Wilcoxon RS: The P-value 0.0006 results from a one-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test, as implemented in R:

wilcox.test(cold, warm, alt="g")$p.val [1] 0.0005720256 Warning message: In wilcox.test.default(cold, warm, alt = "g") : cannot compute exact p-value with ties  Welch t test: P-value 0.038 results from a one-sided Welch t test. t.test(cold, warm, alt="g")$p.val
[1] 0.0384483


Fisher exact test: A one-sided Fisher exact test (based on a hypergeometric model) looking at categories 'No Failures' and 'At least One Failure' gives P-value 0.003. Out of 17 failure-free launches, none were among the four in cold weather.

phyper(0, 17, 7,  4)
[1] 0.003293808


Which test is 'best' here?

• Assurances of well-approximated P-values notwithstanding, I would wonder whether to use the Wilcoxon test in the face of so very many ties.
• Legendary robustness or not, I would wonder about the accuracy of the P-value from the Welch t test.
• The permutation test and Fisher's exact test seem to rest on more solid ground. (Although the Fisher test may lose some power by reducing results to two categories.)

Note: The Commission concluded that O-rings used in the shuttles were not sufficiently pliable at cooler temperatures to provide a safe fuel seal between sections of booster rockets. Google 'Challenger commission' or see Feynman, R.P (1988): "What do you care what other people think," Norton.

• I literally can't understand anything you wrote here – Eric Kim Jul 8 at 2:19
• Sorry about that. Maybe I missed the point of your question. Maybe you can explain what you mean by "Under what circumstances does Mann-Whitney test fail, and what are the alternatives that I have in such cases?" – BruceET Jul 8 at 4:14