R. A. Fisher's Exact Test Revisited
Abstract
This note provides a conceptual clarification of Ronald Aylmer Fisher's (1935) pioneering exact test in the context of the Lady Testing Tea experiment. It unveils a critical implicit assumption in Fisher's calibration: the taster minimizes expected misclassification given fixed probabilistic information. Without similar assumptions or an explicit alternative hypothesis, the rationale behind Fisher's specification of the rejection region remains unclear.
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