Studies in the history of probability and statistics, LI: the first conditional logistic regression

Abstract

Statisticians and epidemiologists generally cite the publications by Prentice & Breslow and by Breslow et al. in 1978 as the first description and use of conditional logistic regression, while economists cite the 1973 book chapter by Nobel laureate McFadden. We describe the until-now-unrecognized use of, and way of fitting, this model in 1934 by Lionel Penrose and Ronald Fisher.