An index for measuring degree of departure from symmetry for ordinal square contingency tables

Abstract

For the analysis of square contingency tables with the same row and column ordinal classifications, this study proposes an index for measuring the degree of departure from the symmetry model using new cumulative probabilities. The proposed index is constructed based on the Cressie and Read’s power divergence, or the weighted average of the Patil and Taillie’s diversity index. This study derives a plug-in estimator of the proposed index and an approximate confidence interval for the proposed index. The estimator of the proposed index is expected to reduce the bias more than the estimator of the existing index, even when the sample size is not large. The proposed index is identical to the existing index under the conditional symmetry model. Therefore, assuming the probability structure in which the conditional symmetry model holds, the performances of plug-in estimators of the proposed and existing indexes can be simply compared. Through numerical examples and real data analysis, the usefulness of the proposed index compared to the existing index is demonstrated.