Levenes

Levenes is a surname observed in various countries and communities. It is often related to other surnames derived from the given name Levi, with spellings and transliterations varying by language and region. As with many surnames, its precise etymology can differ among families, and it appears in both historical and contemporary records.

The most widely recognized use of the name in a technical context is Levene's test, named after American statistician Howard Levene. Introduced in 1960, Levene's test is a method for assessing the equality of variances across two or more groups. It is commonly used as a robust alternative to Bartlett's test, particularly when data are not normally distributed. The procedure analyzes the absolute deviations of observations from group centers (means or medians) and then applies an analysis of variance to those deviations. A variant based on medians, known as the Brown-Forsythe version, offers further robustness to non-normality. Beyond statistics, Levenes as a surname appears among individuals in various professions, but there is no single non-statistical concept universally associated with the name.