Journal of Data Science

Abstract: This paper presents a permutation test for the incomplete pairs setting. This situation arises in both observational and experimental studies when some of the data are in the form of a paired sample and the rest of the data comprise two independent samples. The proposed method uses the data from the two types of samples to test the difference between the mean responses. Our test statistic combines the observed mean difference for the complete pairs with the difference between the two means of the independent samples. The randomizations are carried out as is typically done with standard permutation tests for paired and independent samples. We show by a simulation study that our statistic performs well in comparison to other methods.