Abstract
Often, we have questions about associations of events or variables with each other or their correlation with each other. For example, in pathology we commonly face the question of association of a test result with a disease status. In statistics, the process of testing the association between events is called hypothesis testing. If the variables are categorical (i.e., they can only assume finite discrete values), a common approach to hypothesis testing is to employ cross tabulation.
Cross tabulation is the summarization of categorical data into a table with each cell in the table containing the frequency (either raw or proportional) of the observations that fit the categories represented by that cell. The summary data presented in cross-tabulated form then can be used for many statistical tests most of which follow a distribution called chi-squared distribution.
In this chapter, we explain the concept of hypothesis testing and introduce the most common statistical tests used in hypothesis testing of categorical data.
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Momeni, A., Pincus, M., Libien, J. (2018). Cross Tabulation and Categorical Data Analysis. In: Introduction to Statistical Methods in Pathology . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60543-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60543-2_5
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