Suggested answer to exercise: Readmission to hospital for asthmatic children, 5

Question 5: Which two of these predictor variables would you expect to be related to one another, whatever the disease in question?

Suggested answer

I would expect age and number of previous admissions to be related. The older the subject is, the more opportunity there will have been for previous admissions.

In fact, they are significantly positively correlated. Because number of previous admissions is highly skew, I chose Kendall's rank correlation coefficient, tau b, which is 0.20, P<0.001. (This is a non-parametric, rank correlation coefficient, which makes allowance for tied ranks in the data.)

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Last updated: 5 April, 2007.

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