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To understand hypergeometric and multinomial better, I’d like to know why fisher exact test used hypergeometric rather than multinomial distribution.

Nick
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1 Answers1

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Fisher's exact test treats the marginals as fixed, so you are dealing with a problem of the kind "draw $n_{11}$ observations (first row first column cell entry) of out $n_{1.}$ (first row marginal) without replacement with overall $n$ observations of which $n_{.1}$ are in the first column marginal". By "first row/column marginal" I mean the total number of observations in the first row/column.

For the multinomial you'd have probabilities for all cells, but marginals could not be fixed.

Christian Hennig
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