From charlesreid1

Intro

The F-statistic can be thought of as a frequentist metric for hypothesis-testing. Once an F-statistic and corresponding p-value is calculated from ANOVA (see Response Surface Methodology#Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) Table, you can determine how confident you can be in a given hypothesis test.

The hypothesis can be the significance of a set of terms, or something else (...)

An example is a parameter model and a reduced parameter model.


See Also

I found this short YouTube video very helpful for illustrating what the F-statistic means physically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMwSS8DAVYk