Comments on “a generalization of fisher's exact test in pxq contingency tables using more concordant relations”

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to criticize Nguyen (1985) for his account of the literature on the generalization of Fisher's exact test and to point out parallels with existing algorithms of the algorithm proposed by Nguyen. Subsequently we will briefly raise some questions on the methodology proposed by Nguyen. Nguyen (1985) suggests that all literature on exact testing prior to Nguyen & Sampson (1985) is based on the “more probable” relation or Exact Probability Test (EPT) as a test statistic. This is not correct. Yates (1934 - Pearson's X2), Lewontin & Felsenstein (1965 - X2), Agresti & Wackerly (1977 - X2, Kendall's tau, Kruskal & Goodman's gamma), Klotz (1966 - Wilcoxon), Klotz & Teng (1977 - Kruskall & Wallis' H), Larntz (1978 - X2, loglike-lihood-ratio statistic G2, Freeman & Tukey statistic), and several others have investigated exact tests with other statistics than the EPT. In fact, Bennett & Nakamura (1963) are incorrectly cited as they investigated both X2 and G2, rather than EPT. Also, Freeman ...