Abstract
George Udny Yule may be described as the father of the contingency table by virtue of his long pioneering paper, “On the association of attributes in statistics” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1900. At the time Yule was closely associated with Karl Pearson at University College London, himself then deeply involved in developing coefficients of correlation and other measures of association in 2 × 2 tables arising from the grouping of normally distributed variables (Pearson introduced the term “contingency table” in 1904). A dozen years later the differing approaches of the two men led to an acrimonious public controversy (described by Mackenzie, 1981; see also Magnello, 1993, and Aldrich, 1995) which, however, lies outside our present topic, the creation of spurious associations through combining heterogeneous material.
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David, H.A., Edwards, A.W.F. (2001). Yule’s Paradox (“Simpson’s Paradox”). In: Annotated Readings in the History of Statistics. Springer Series in Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3500-0_19
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