A measure of asymmetry for ordinal square contingency tables with an application to modified LANZA score data.

In clinical researches, various clinical scales with ordered categories are used to evaluate the efficacy and safety/toxicity of treatments. Such the clinical scales are sometimes summarized on the transition between the baseline and the study end point as a square contingency table. Also, clinical scales may be reclassified into three groups. However, the cutpoints can be varied depending on clinical researches or clinicians. Hence, this paper proposes a measure which is expressed by using same weights for collapsed tables and which can see the directionality for two kinds of asymmetries. Also, this paper shows an application of the proposed measure to clinical data, and that the proposed measure is a useful statistical method for analyzing ordered categorical data.