Symmetry and Marginal Homogeneity of anr×rContingency Table

Abstract

The principle of minimum discrimination information estimation is employed to obtain RBAN (Regular Best Asymtotically Normal) estimates of the cell frequencies of an r × r contingency table under hypotheses of either symmetry or marginal homogeneity. For the latter, a convergent iterative procedure is given to compute the estimates. The associated minimum discrimination information statistics are distributed asymptotically as χ 2 under the null hypotheses. The procedures differ from those previously presented in the literature and permit of extension to multidimensional contingency tables. An example is given.