XLSTAT - Contingency Table (Two-way Table)

Contingency table structure

A contingency table is an efficient way to summarize the relation (or correspondence) between two categorical variables V1 and V2. It has the following structure:

V1 \ V2 Category 1 Category j Category m2
Category 1 n(1,1) n(1,j) n(1,m2)
Category i n(i,1) n(i,j) n(i,m2)
Category m1 n(m1,1) n(m1,j) n(m1,m2)

where n(i,j) is the frequency of observations that show both characteristic i for variable V1, and characteristic j for variable V2.

Test on contingency table

XLSTAT provides you with two criteria to characterize the relationship between the two variables:

  • The Chi-square distance has been suggested to measure the distance between two categories. The Pearson chi-square statistic, which is the sum of the Chi-square distances, is used to test the independence between rows and columns.
  • Inertia is a measure inspired from physics that is often used in Correspondence Analysis, a method that is used to analyse in depth contingency tables. The inertia of a set of points is the weighted mean of the squared distances to the center of gravity.

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Last modified 25 November, 2011