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chi-square test

any of various procedures that use a chi-square distribution to evaluate how well a theory fits a set of observed data. Unless otherwise specified, this term usually refers to the chi-square test for independence, used to determine whether there is a relationship between two variables whose values are categories. For example, it may be used to test whether sex (male vs. female) is unrelated to having a household pet (yes vs. no). It compares observed data to the data that would be expected in each cell of a contingency table if the two variables were entirely independent. This discrepancy between observed and expected counts is then used to compute the chi-square statistic. Also called chi-square procedure.

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