Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is a statistical method used to compare the means of three or more groups to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between them. In this case, we are interested in comparing the mean stock prices of companies across different sectors.
ANOVA is used to determine differences between research results from three or more unrelated samples or groups.
You might use ANOVA when you want to test a particular hypothesis between groups, determining – in using one-way ANOVA – the relationship between an independent variable and one quantitative dependent variable.