A network algorithm for the exact treatment of the 2×k contingency table

Abstract

A common statistical problem encountered in biomedical research is to test the hypothesis that the parameters of k binomial populations are all equal. An exact test of significance of this hypothesis is possible in principle, the appropriate null distribution being a normalized product of k binomial coefficients. However, the problem of computing the tail area of this distribution can be formidable since it requires the enumeration of all sets of k binomial coefficients whose product is less than a given constant. Existing algorithms, all of which rely on explicit enumeration to generate feasible binomial coefficients

Keywords:

• contingency tables
• Fisher's exact test of significance
• binary data analysis
• network algorithm
• implicit enumeration
• dynamic programming