1. Note on J. B. S. Haldane's Paper: 'The Exact Value of the Moments of the Distribution of χ 2 .'
- Author
-
W. G. Cochran
- Subjects
Statistics and Probability ,Contingency table ,Distribution (number theory) ,Applied Mathematics ,General Mathematics ,Degrees of freedom ,Variance (accounting) ,Term (logic) ,Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) ,Part iii ,Combinatorics ,Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty ,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences ,Value (mathematics) ,Independence (probability theory) ,Mathematics - Abstract
IN this paper Haldane points out (p. 142) a difference between his results for the mean and variance of x2 in a 2 x n-fold contingency table when the expectation p is fixed and the results obtained by me in my paper (Annals of Eugenics, Vol. VII, part III, p. 211). The difference is that I have (n 1) throughout where Haldane has n. Haldane writes, "my own results would appear to be slightly more accurate than Cochran's", which might, I think, give the impression that both Haldane's results and mine are only approximations. In fact, both results are mathematically exact, the difference between them being one of definition of x2. My paper is almost entirely concerned with the distribution of x2 when the expectation p is not known. In the results which I gave for the distribution of x2 when p is known, I retained the term S (x -x-)2 in the numerator of x2 instead of S (x np)2, to facilitate comparison between this and my other results. Thus my x2 has (n 1) degrees of freedom, whereas Haldane's x2 has n degrees of freedom. Unfortunately I did not emphasize this point in the passage concerned, and as it may have appeared misleading to others besides Haldane, I welcome this opportunity of drawing attention to it. Haldane's x2 is, of course, the one which is normally appropriate in testing the departure from independence when the expectation is known.
- Published
- 1938