Definition
In the area of learning theory, the term contingency refers to the extent to which the presence of an event (the predictor event) is associated with changes in the probability of occurrence of another event (the outcome event).
Main Text
Like correlation, the concept of contingency refers to the degree of covariation between two events. Although contingency can be measured in different ways, an extensively used index is ΔP (Allan 1980), which measures the one-way dependency between two binary events. Specifically, for a predictor and an outcome that can be either present or absent this index is equal to the difference between the probability of the outcome event happening when the predictor event is present, P(Outcome|Predictor), and the probability of the outcome event happening when the predictor event is absent, P(Outcome| ~ Predictor):
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References
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Barberia, I., Vadillo, M.A. (2017). Contingency. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1242-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1242-1
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