Abstract
The paper presents inequalities between four descriptive statistics that have been used to measure the nominal agreement between two or more raters. Each of the four statistics is a function of the pairwise information. Light’s kappa and Hubert’s kappa are multi-rater versions of Cohen’s kappa. Fleiss’ kappa is a multi-rater extension of Scott’s pi, whereas Randolph’s kappa generalizes Bennett et al. S to multiple raters. While a consistent ordering between the numerical values of these agreement measures has frequently been observed in practice, there is thus far no theoretical proof of a general ordering inequality among these measures. It is proved that Fleiss’ kappa is a lower bound of Hubert’s kappa and Randolph’s kappa, and that Randolph’s kappa is an upper bound of Hubert’s kappa and Light’s kappa if all pairwise agreement tables are weakly marginal symmetric or if all raters assign a certain minimum proportion of the objects to a specified category.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Warrens, M.J. Inequalities between multi-rater kappas. Adv Data Anal Classif 4, 271–286 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11634-010-0073-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11634-010-0073-4
Keywords
- Nominal agreement
- Cohen’s kappa
- Scott’s pi
- Light’s kappa
- Hubert’s kappa
- Fleiss’ kappa
- Randolph’s kappa
- Cauchy–Schwarz inequality
- Arithmetic-harmonic means inequality
Mathematics Subject Classification (2010)
- 62H17
- 62H20
- 62P25