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Concept
Fisher's exact test
Summary
Fisher's exact test is a statistical significance test used in the analysis of contingency tables. Although in practice it is employed when sample sizes are small, it is valid for all sample sizes. It is named after its inventor, Ronald Fisher, and is one of a class of exact tests, so called because the significance of the deviation from a null hypothesis (e.g., p-value) can be calculated exactly, rather than relying on an approximation that becomes exact in the limit as the sample size grows to infinity, as with many statistical tests.
Fisher is said to have devised the test following a comment from Muriel Bristol, who claimed to be able to detect whether the tea or the milk was added first to her cup. He tested her claim in the "lady tasting tea" experiment.
The test is useful for categorical data that result from classifying objects in two different ways; it is used to examine the significance of the association (contingency) between the two kinds of classification. So in Fisher's original example, one criterion of classification could be whether milk or tea was put in the cup first; the other could be whether Bristol thinks that the milk or tea was put in first. We want to know whether these two classifications are associated—that is, whether Bristol really can tell whether milk or tea was poured in first. Most uses of the Fisher test involve, like this example, a 2 × 2 contingency table (discussed below). The p-value from the test is computed as if the margins of the table are fixed, i.e. as if, in the tea-tasting example, Bristol knows the number of cups with each treatment (milk or tea first) and will therefore provide guesses with the correct number in each category. As pointed out by Fisher, this leads under a null hypothesis of independence to a hypergeometric distribution of the numbers in the cells of the table.
With large samples, a chi-squared test (or better yet, a G-test) can be used in this situation.
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