Lesson plan
Type III error
In statistical hypothesis testing, there are various notions of so-called type III errors (or errors of the third kind), and sometimes type IV errors or higher, by analogy with the type I and type II errors of Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Fundamentally, type III errors occur when researchers provide the right answer to the wrong question, i.e. when the hypothesis is correctly rejected but for the wrong reason. Since the paired notions of type I errors (or "false positives") and type II errors (or "false negatives") that were introduced by Neyman and Pearson are now widely used, their choice of terminology ("errors of the first kind" and "errors of the second kind"), has led others to suppose that certain sorts of mistakes that they have identified might be an "error of the third kind", "fourth kind", etc. None of these proposed categories have been widely accepted. The following is a brief account of some of these proposals.
Article summary
In statistical hypothesis testing, there are various notions of so-called type III errors (or errors of the third kind), and sometimes type IV errors or higher, by analogy with the type I and type II errors of Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Fundamentally, type III errors occur when researchers provide the right answer to the wrong question, i.e. when the hypothesis is correctly rejected but for the wrong reason. Since the paired notions of type I errors (or "false positives") and type II errors (or "false negatives") that were introduced by Neyman and Pearson are now widely used, their choice of terminology ("errors of the first kind" and "errors of the second kind"), has led others to suppose that certain sorts of mistakes that they have identified might be an "error of the third kind", "fourth kind", etc. None of these proposed categories have been widely accepted. The following is a brief account of some of these proposals.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.