Ordered alternative hypothesis is a hypothesis or assumption which speci?es an order for the set of parameters of interest as an alternative to the equality, rather than simply that they are not all equal. For instance, in an evaluation of the treatment effect of a drug at several different doses,

It might be thought reasonable to postulate that the response variable shows either a monotonic increasing or monotonic decreasing effect with dose. In this type of case the null hypothesis of the equality of, say, a set or group of m means would be tested against

by making use some suitable test procedure such as Jonckheere's k-sample test.